Onetti. Juan Carlos Onetti.

Petri Liukkonen

Juan Carlos Onetti (1909 – 1994)

Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer, a master in fusing fantasy and realism. Onetti was awarded Uruguay's national literature prize in 1963 and Spain's prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1980. In La vida breve (1950) Onetti created the fictional city of Santa María, which also is the setting of his later works. The narrator of the novel, Brausen, invents a fantasy existence for himself as Díaz Grey, the protagonist of a screenplay he is writing.

"Onetti's uneven, troubled career has resolved itself into a large body of critically admired prose that, finally, hews to a single driving artistic impulse: the necessary predominance of writing process. Onetti's anguished, detached narrators, creators of public words and private torments, brought Latin American fiction out of its provincial stasis at a time when talent, opportunity, and attention were poised to grant it greatness, and the Latin American novel from the 1940s onward stands as the heir to Onetti's artistic, self-examining vision."