A Dream Come True

Starred review from September 23, 2019
In this standout collection, the Uruguayan Onetti (The Shipyard), who died in 1994, masterly depicts the seedy disillusionment of characters in a South American backwater. The book is arranged chronologically, beginning with the short, trenchant tales of the 1930s and ’40s, the best of which include “The Possible Baldi,” “The Tragic End of Alfredo Plumet,” and “A Dream Come True.” The longer stories that follow are, like several of his novels, set in Santa Maria, an imaginary riverside town whose inhabitants—be they baronial planters, newspapermen, or drunkards—all seem baffled or defeated by the “incomprehensible ritual of living.” Onetti writes, “We all lie, even before words,” and many of the stories involve elaborate acts of self-deception and profound misinterpretations: a vagabond couple befriends a rich, elderly woman (“The Tale of Rosenkavalier and the Pregnant Virgin from Lilliput”); a newspaper writer’s estranged wife sends him lewd photographs of her with other men (“Most Dreaded Hell”); a husband punishes his wife for a long-ago indiscretion by paving over her beloved garden (“As Sad as She”). In the preamble to one memorable story, “Matias the Telegraph Operator,” Onetti’s narrator explains that “bare facts don’t matter at all. What matters is what they contain or carry, and then to discover what lies beyond that, and then beyond that, till we get to the deepest depths, which we will never reach.” There is a hint of Conrad in these misty tales that plunge beyond “bare facts” and conjure up a world suffused with misanthropy and meditative irony. Readers will be bewitched.

September 15, 2019
Centrifugal stories, many set in an imaginary city, by the Uruguayan master storyteller. Ranked alongside Borges and García Márquez, though far less well known, Onetti (1909-1994) exercised much influence over the development of magical realism. In this collection of his short works, the first in English, Onetti himself seems influenced by Poe by way of Baudelaire--but then filtered through William Burroughs, or perhaps B. Traven. The inhabitants of his imagined Santa María, a port city much like his native Montevideo, are a strange bunch, many of them German and Italian immigrants who are nowhere at home. One, Baldi, has money in his pocket from a legal settlement and visions of an Academy of Bliss, "a project that would prove magnificent, with a bold glass edifice rising out of a garden city, full of bars, metal colonnades, orchestras playing next to golden beaches, and thousands of pink billboards." Alas, the streets are grittier than all that, and, seemingly trying to impress a woman with cash and blarney, he spins a tale that involves racist murder and illegal drugs, "spitting his words out like curses." Many of Onetti's characters harbor dreams large and small, most of them abandoned along the way, "ground down under the mindless, constant pressure of so many thousands of unavoidable feet." Some, unable to stand up to that pressure, end their lives, as with one 50-year-old woman who finds herself "a slave of the blackness she agreed to sink breathing in for the last time." Others are blithe in their ignorance or lose their grip, "shamelessly exhibiting an ancient and concealed madness." Onetti's stories are enigmatic and elegant, seldom extending more than a few pages; some seem to be only sketches for longer pieces, such as a one-pager in which a stranger plants a kiss on the forehead of a dead man, "leaving between the horizontality of the three wrinkles a small crimson smudge." All are strange--and mesmerizing. A welcome, overdue collection by a writer well deserving of his place in the Latin American canon.

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November 1, 2019

One of the greats of Spanish American literature, Uruguayan Onetti, noted primarily for his novels, has enjoyed less dissemination of his short stories; until now they have not been widely available to English-speaking audiences. This retrospective collection captures for the first time in English all 50 of Onetti's short stories in chronological order from 1933 until his death 60 years later. Ranging from three paragraphs to novella length, the stories are often set in Onetti's microcosmic Santa Maria, the mythical urban location that unites these scenarios to those of his longer works. The dense writing, grim if not macabre atmospheres, melancholy characters leading futile lives of misery and despair, and generally unsettling but often inexact endings necessitate an attentive if not subsequent reading. Witness the dire situation of the female protagonist in "As Sad as She," which leaves her only one fateful choice; or the woman in the eponymous "A Dream Come True," who asks an impresario to mount a play based on a strange dream she had; or Charlie in "Montaigne," who invites six friends to attend his suicide. VERDICT The haunting yet engaging stories in this comprehensive collection will expose Onetti to a much broader readership than has heretofore existed.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

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