Onetti, Juan Carlos (Vol. 7) - Onetti, Juan Carlos 1909–
Onetti, Juan Carlos 1909–
Onetti, "the lone wolf of Uruguayan letters," is a novelist and short story writer. He is the author of some of Latin America's earliest innovative novels.
Meditating on the world of solitary inner lives he has created out of what might pass for superfluous materials in the age of industrial waste, Onetti, a man who has never bargained, said in an interview in 1961, without immodesty: "All I want to express is the adventure of man." (pp. 177-78)
His immersion in his work is so extreme that it acquires terrifying proportions in his mind. He is afraid to "abandon" himself to his writing. Remembering his books afterwards seems to affect him in the same way. He has left them behind, forgetting them as he has forgotten his own life—they are so much a part of it. "I am not a writer except when I write," he says. Like Proust or Faulkner—especially the latter, with whom he identifies in more ways than one; we think of...
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