James Polk

Following the dictates of providence can lead one down the strangest paths. Consider, for example, Larsen the pimp -- Body Snatcher or Snatcher to all who know him -- who long ago realized that "he'd been born to achieve two perfections: a perfect woman and a perfect bordello."

His search for this happy destiny is transposed by the Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti into a fabulist's delight. Packed with ironies, exaggerations and huge ambiguities, "Body Snatcher," as exuberantly translated by Alfred Mac Adam, leads readers through a hectic conglomeration of disparate lives, all reacting in one manner or another to this quest.

We are in the mystic environs of Santa Maria, an imaginary urban landscape that figures in much of Mr. Onetti's fiction. Barthe, the local druggist and a town councilman, after 12 years of failure, is about to fulfill his dream. In exchange for his vote on an issue he opposes, the council will let him open Santa Maria's first brothel. Barthe knows his limitations and puts the experienced Body Snatcher in charge of carrying out the council's decision. After all, what for the pharmacist is but a dream is the other man's very destiny -- and, as Snatcher points out, "with dreams you just never know."

The new enterprise stirs the city in surprising ways. In a place where reality and surreality uneasily coexist, where narrative mixes with interior monologue under a cloud of enigmatic vagueness, Mr. Onetti leads his peculiar cast through a continuing series of peculiar situations.

A teen-ager named Jorge, convinced that he is doomed "to die young, naive, ignorant, without understanding," is having an affair with his older brother Federico's widow, Julita, who has chosen madness "to go on living." To keep Federico alive, she transforms Jorge into his brother and imagines that she carries her husband's child. Meanwhile, Julita's cynical, manipulative brother, Marcos, drinks with his cronies and gradually sinks into a kind of nihilistic fog. "The difference between us," he finally declares to Jorge, "is that you think, still think, that something's going to happen someday. . . . I haven't thought that for years."

Diaz Grey, a physician and the sometime voice of the author, observes everything from his own corner of whatever scene is playing at the time. Early on, he sums up the city and its aimless citizens: "Around here we only differ from one another in the type of self-negation we choose or which is imposed on us."

Once Snatcher's destiny is apparently fulfilled, life in Santa Maria continues on course -- briefly. Then the letters start. Wives are anonymously informed that their husbands have been seen entering the bordello. Civic and business leaders are chastised for the sins they have permitted to seep into the previously untarnished city.

As with the unsigned lampoons that so shook the town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "In Evil Hour," the letters change things completely. The church, in the person of the worldly Father Bergner, must get involved. The moribund League of Decency springs into action, photographing patrons of Snatcher's establishment and generally raising a fuss.

Can one seriously expect a resolution from this tangled plot? One cannot. Jorge gets somewhere, Julita gets somewhere quite different and Snatcher's destiny is postponed. The others continue to drift.

To an English-speaking audience, Juan Carlos Onetti, a resident of Spain following his imprisonment by the Uruguayan military in the mid-1970's, is probably the least-known giant among modern Latin American writers. Here he shows us what we've missed, controlling a wandering narrative with firmness and verve.

Mr. Onetti clearly prefers the circular to the linear, and the static to the dynamic. The result is intense and highly idiosyncratic. "Body Snatcher," originally published in Argentina in 1964, is part of the "Saga Sanmariana," a series of novels in the Faulknerian mode in which characters not only recur but also create other characters (the Diaz Grey of this novel, for instance, has stepped out of a screenplay by the narrator of another Onetti novel, "A Brief Life"). Its readers will find that Mario Vargas Llosa was being only slightly hyperbolic when he called Juan Carlos Onetti the first "creative" novelist to come out of Latin America.

BODY SNATCHER By Juan Carlos Onetti. Translated by Alfred Mac Adam. 305 pp. New York: Pantheon Books.