I´m a huge fan of Onetti, and I was thrilled to find a first edition of this short, 100 page novella at one of my local used bookstores the other day. To tell the truth, it is the first “first edition” I´ve ever owned, and I´m glad it´s by Onetti: as I read more of his books, I become more and more convinced that he will become one of my favorite authors. I like brutal, pessimistic, realistic fiction, and I like his style and his choice of protagonists that are stuck in lives that are incomprehensible and hardly worth living, drowning themselves in alcohol and despair. This book is the story of one woman, Magdalena (Magda) from the perspective of three men who met and fell in love with her in very different manners. It alternates between Buenos Aires and the fictional town of Santa María, the Macondo of Onetti (but far different than Gabriel García Márquez´s creation), and the interactions between the characters take place mostly in bars. It is a story very small in scope, limited essentially to three moments, three dialogues between different people, and a short epilogue. It is a great compliment to his other works, and I was happy to sit down and read this book in its entirety yesterday.

I was introduced to Juan Carlos Onetti in an odd, backward way. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia, I used to give my mom lists of authors that I was interested in, so that she could order some used books online and send them on to me (the Peace Corps library, while extensive, was pretty much monolingual, and I love to read in Spanish). I got a book called Cuando ya no Importe (Past Caring), which turns out to be the last book that Onetti wrote, a sort of literary epilogue that, without any background knowledge on what I was reading, was a very strange book. It showed me enough to search out more of his work when I came back to the States, and in the past year I´ve tracked down and read a few more of his books. Many of his books take place in Santa María, a made up town on the banks of the Paraná (probably) where a series of washed up protagonists and recurring locals interact with each other in ways that lay bare their anguish and lack of hope for the future. Often they have vague aspirations that are already destined to fail, even in their own eyes, and the plot consists of their struggle to continue on with projects that they know will eventually fall apart and crumble at their feet. I´ve heard him described as South America´s first and greatest existentialist, and based on how much I´ve been loving his books, as well as those of Albert Camus, I think it´s time that I investigate existentialism more fully, so that I can better understand what that means and why I´ve been liking these books so much.

I highly recommend Onetti, and I think at least two of his books, Bodysnatchers and The Shipyard, can be had cheaply on www.abebooks.com. They´re both excellent. He´s an author that I recommend to my friends because he introduces you to a different Latin American reality, a world of washed up men and women, drunks, prostitutes and smugglers, on the banks of one of South America´s biggest and most culturally important rivers. I think that his cycle of books set in Santa María will mean as much to me as an adult as the Macondo cycle of Gabriel García Márquez meant to me as a teenager, and they excite me in the same way: each book shows me a new facet of his world and fleshes out more of the questions that remain in my mind. ( )