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The Shipyard
£8.99
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Book Details
- ISBN 9781852424817
- 4 December 2006
- 192pp
- Paperback
- 129 x 198mm
Contributors
Introduction by
Nick Caistor
Trade Resources
Synopsis
First published in 1961, The Shipyard chronicles an anti-hero named Larsen who returns to a fictional place, Santa María, to try to revive a useless and abandoned shipyard.
With all the enthusiasm of a man condemned to be hanged, Larsen takes up his new post. Like the other workers at the shipyard, he routinely goes through the motions. Every so often, his sense of reality is shaken by a tremor of self-deception and then it is possible to believe that the yard’s glory is not just a thing of the past.
In spite of its melancholy and sense of alienation, Onetti’s novel conveys, through its unique poetic language, a real sense of transcendence and hope. Allegorical,
reflecting the decay and breakdown of Uruguayan society and modern urban life, The Shipyard is a landmark of Latin American literature.
Reviews
'The Graham Greene of Uruguay... foreshadowing the work of Beckett and Camus' Sunday Telegraph
‘The Onetti experience is a curious one: readers end up feeling that they understand life better after a stay in this ghostly, tantalising world, only to lose the wisdom they have gained after a few hours of release from the spell. The form is subtle and delicate, the message sordid and bleak, the flavour inimitable’ Guardian
‘Onetti's voice and subject matter are his own... his work is always on a knife-edge... He is laconic, elegant, literary’ London Review of Books
‘This literary landmark is here delivered in a wonderful translation that retains all the bleakness and poetry of the antihero Larsen as he attempts to salvage the unsalvageable’ Independent on Sunday
'Combining the alienation of Camus with the fatalism of Eeyore' Guardian
‘Onetti’s poetic prose captures Larsen’s world, be it mad or confused, and makes The Shipyard absorbing reading’ Morning Star