A Faint Sound of Rust

Michael Wood

• ‘The Pit’ and ‘Tonight’ by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated by Peter Bush
  Quartet, 216 pp, £12.95, June 1991, ISBN 0 7043 2767 8
• The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated by Nick Caistor
  Serpent’s Tail, 186 pp, £8.99, February 1992, ISBN 1 85242 191 6
• ‘Farewells’ and ‘A Grave with No Name’ by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated by Peter Bush
  Quartet, 136 pp, £12.95, March 1992, ISBN 0 7043 7015 8
• Body Snatcher by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated by Alfred MacAdam
  Quartet, 305 pp, £13.95, October 1991, ISBN 0 7043 2797 X
• A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated by Hortense Carpentier
  Serpent’s Tail, 292 pp, £9.99, February 1993, ISBN 1 85242 301 3
• Cuando ya no importe by Juan Carlos Onetti
  Alfaguara, 205 pp, £10.95, March 1993, ISBN 84 204 8107 6

Juan Carlos Onetti, 84 years old and now a Spanish citizen, living in Madrid, is one of the most distinguished and most neglected of Latin American writers. He was born in Montevideo, but takes the idea of being an important Uruguayan author as something short of a compliment, even as a kind of joke. He hasn’t sought his neglect, but he has cultivated the neglect he found, made it part of his story. He boasts of failing to get literary prizes in the way other writers casually mention that they’ve got them. His neglect began early, almost as soon as he was discovered, with his harsh and jagged short story ‘El Pozo’ (‘The Pit’), 1939; and when he did get a major literary prize, the Cervantes, it was in 1978, late enough for the legend of neglect to be maintained.