Novel
A Brief Life
La vida breve
Juan Carlos Onetti · 1950
Synopsis
Juan María Brausen, an advertising man in Buenos Aires, is about to lose his job; his wife, Gertrudis, has just had a breast operation, and her body repels him. A friend advises him to write a film script: he invents a small town on the river, Santa María, and a doctor, Díaz Grey, to whom a woman comes to ask for morphine. Through the partition he hears his neighbour, la Queca, a prostitute, living her life, and he enters her life under another name, Arce. Three existences then advance side by side.
Context
The novel appears in 1950 in Buenos Aires and gives birth to Santa María, an invented town where most of its author's later books will be set; one study compares it to Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo. A British critic, Donald Shaw, regards it as the first novel of the Latin American boom; its complexity at first kept it away from the general public. It was translated into French by Alice Gascar in 1971 and into English by Hortense Carpentier in 1976. In 2024, the academies of the Spanish language devote a commemorative edition to it.
Who it is for
A novel in Spanish, with three interwoven narratives, difficult to enter at first; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's first masterpiece and as one of his most celebrated novels.
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