Onetti. Juan Carlos Onetti.

Ronald de Feo

Almost 40 years separates these two novels, and yet in their concerns, methods, and tone they often seem only a few years apart. Onetti established his world of hopeless dreamers and cynical losers early on in his career, when he was still in his early thirties. No Man's Land, which was first published in 1941, is set in Buenos Aires and focuses on a close-knit group of relatively young intellectuals; mostly artists and activists yet they seem to have prematurely taken on the disillusion and self-preoccupation of the middle-aged characters who will inhabit almost all of Onetti's future fiction. Although they appear to be more politically and socially active than their later burnt-out counterparts, they are equally caught up in futile pursuits and meaningless ritual. Love affairs animate their lives and often seem central to their existence;indeed, many scenes in No Man's Land take place in bedrooms but already these experiences are portrayed as sordid or doomed.

Let the Wind Speak was published in 1979 in Spain, where the Uruguayan novelist lived in exile until his death in 1994. Like No Man's Land, this novel contains a large cast of characters, including Onetti's metaphysical repertory companied. Díaz Grey, Brausen and Larsen (the so-called "Body Snatcher"), who turn up throughout Onetti's fiction and often wrestle with moral and spiritual dilemmas. Though also heavily populated, the book is more focused and less fragmented than No Man's Land. Whereas the earlier novel is narrated from multiple points of view and mostly cast in third-person, Let the Wind Speak is guided by a single point of view and for at least part of the way employs a first-person narrator. In the character of Medina, the former police chief of Santa María (the mythical town that serves as the setting for much of Onetti's work), we find another of the author's tormented, morally ambiguous, yet oddly likable anti-heroes a man haunted by loss, failure, and advancing age.

Yet although the narrative is driven by Medina's problems and obsessions, Onetti feels the need to move outside his protagonist and regard him more objectively, relating all of the action in the second half of the novel in the third-person, while maintaining Medina's perspective. Also in this section he further complicates his already elliptical narrative by including, in parentheses, quoted asides that are apparently Medina's supplements to the action. These notes lead us to reflect back on the book we have been reading and wonder about Medina's creative complicity and the truthfulness of the events described. For at times the character appears to be living in his narrative as well as inventing it, acting simultaneously as participant, observer, and creator.

This play of narrative roles and perspective, the blurring of personalities and facts, of the author and his work make for an open-ended, self-reflexive, and at times seemingly free-associative text. It's as if Onetti were using the novel as a symbolic journal, a therapeutic exercise through which he can vent his obsessions and fears and possibly exorcise them.

Medina lives in exile in Lavanda, a town across the river from his former home, Santa María. From this vantage point, he can reflect on his former life there on his successes and, particularly, on his failures. As in so much of Onetti's fiction, significant events have already occurred long in the past, and the characters are so consumed by them that they find little solace in the present. Yet although everyone in Let the Wind Speak seems to be living in retrospect, details of the past remain annoyingly vague. In this respect, Onetti's subtle, indirect approach to narrative particularly in the way he fractures information and incidents can try the reader's patience as much as stimulate his curiosity.

Medina's relationship to the young, but already dissipated Julián Seoane underscores Onetti's general narrative strategy we can never completely grasp a character or his role because the author refuses to treat him as a fixed being with a clearly delineated history. Similarly, Onetti often refuses to endow his characters with a firm code of ethics or morality. Stranger still, sometimes even their identities are flexible: Medina, for example, was a police chief, but now is both a (fake) doctor and a (not particularly talented) painter.

Seoane, as he is known simply throughout the text, may or may not be Medina's son, but Medina devotes considerable attention to him and his inebriated existence. In fact, much of the second half of the novel is devoted to Medina's search for Seoane, who has taken up with Medina's tough, promiscuous former mistress and has disappeared with her somewhere in Santa María. Dr. Díaz Grey, for one, is puzzled by Medina's return to town and wonders if he is "attracted by the famous nostalgia for filth." As for Medina himself, he is puzzled over the extent of his own concern for Seoane. He concludes, however, that it isn't really the person who interests him but his predicament: "He wasn't what mattered to me; it was his unhappiness, his enslavement."

This sense of identification with the life of another, this blending of selves is central to Onetti's fictional cosmos. After all, it was Juan María Brausen, the protagonist of the writer's 1950 landmark novel A Brief Life, who first imagined and thus gave birth to Santa María, projecting himself into this mythical place and also into the character of Dr. Díaz Grey. It is difficult to think of another instance in fiction in which a character creates a world out of his head and that world and its people, along with the creator himself, become the subjects of a whole series of novels and stories.

While often compelling for its Chinese-box-like construction and its hall-of-mirrors effect an author creates a character who in turns creates other characters &Mac220;this aspect of Onetti's work can also lead to a sameness of voice and psychology. Characters sometimes sound so much alike that they are indistinguishable from one another, or else simply come across as convenient mouthpieces for the author and his very elegant, philosophically-charged rhetoric. Seoane, for example, hardly strikes the reader as stable or insightful and yet at times he sounds very much like the reflective Medina (or like Onetti himself): "I sometimes talk to myself from outside. . . . I give myself advice, I make plans for my life and promise myself to follow them, I make fun of the truth. And when I wake up I remember with regret what I'd been telling myself; I stop being split in two, there is nothing of me left outside of me and I feel hopeless."

While Let the Wind Speak is, in many ways, representative Onetti, its rambling and diffuse narrative too often undercuts its effectiveness. The book works best in the context of the author's fiction as a whole. Certainly readers who have read little of Onetti will find it hard to relate to long-time characters, who have weight and significance here based on their appearances in previous books.

The novel, which Onetti wrote when he was nearly 70, really serves as a summation of his extended narrative cycle, a way of taking stock and also taking leave of a world that has been with him for much of his career. In fact, in the last pages of Let the Wind Speak, the creator becomes the destroyer as Onetti describes a catastrophic wind and fire that sweep through Santa María.

No Man's Land, too, fares better when considered as part of a body of work rather than as a single entity. In this book a young Onetti seems to be sketching a world that he will later render in greater detail and with more intensity. The novel is composed of relatively brief chapters, with the author jumping from character to character, scene to scene, in an attempt to capture a cross-section of the younger generation in pre-World-War II Buenos Aires. Yet despite its panoramic nature, the book often feels claustrophobic and static, partly because of its unvarying tone, and partly because of the antidramatic structure of its episodes action seems to begin in mid-course, without enough of a context to fully involve the reader.

In describing the lost generation he portrays in No Man's Land, Onetti once noted: "The fact is that the most important country of the young South American continent has started to produce a type of morally indifferent individual who has lost his faith and all interest in his own fate." While the characters do seem quite distraught over the political situation of the period specifically a reactionary Argentine government and pro-Axis sympathizers their dissatisfaction often appears to have deeper, less tangible roots: They seem to be suffering from the free-floating existential despair that typically affects Onetti's people.

In this early novel we already find Onetti's characters fixating on a dream. Here, as in the later short story "Esberg by the Sea," some dream of travel to a Polynesian island. In later novels the dream will take the form of a new job or business we think of Larsen caring for a crumbling shipyard in The Shipyard or Larsen, again, in Body Snatcher trying to establish a perfect brothel. These dreams are really symbolic of a desire for escape, a need to form new lives and identities. We also already see in this book the depressed, world-weary Onetti hero beginning to assume shape in the person of Diego Aránzuru, who at one point is disturbed by the peculiar course of life and memory: "People, places and moments had come to him out of the previous nothingness and were slowly being swallowed up again." And we also meet one significant member of Onetti's future road company&Mac220; the ubiquitous Larsen makes an appearance at the very beginning of the novel.

Yet for all their provocative links to other works in the Onetti canon and their remarkable images of isolation and decay, neither No Man's Land nor Let the Wind Speak shows off the author to best advantage. One would have to go to more tightly structured narratives, such as Onetti's novel The Shipyard or the stories "Hell Most Feared" and "Welcome, Bob" or to more intricate and resonant texts, such as A Brief Life, to fully experience Onetti's artful power. What does hold us to these two uneven books is Onetti's tough uncompromising vision of existence, perhaps the toughest and most consistent in all of Latin American fiction and one that gives even his weaker narratives a disturbing, mournful conviction.