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A Brief Life
£8.99
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Book Details
- ISBN 9781852429782
- 4 December 2008
- 300 pp
- Paperback
Contributors
Translated by
Hortense Carpentier
Trade Resources
Synopsis
Written in 1950, A Brief Life is the first novel to feature Onetti’s mythical town of Santa María. His protagonist Brausen eavesdrops on the conversation of his neighbours, a husband and wife, imagining their gestures, their expressions.
Brausen lives with his wife, who has undergone major surgery after being diagnosed with breast cancer. To compensate for this physical void which stalls their caresses, Brausen imagines stories: of Santa María, and of a doctor named Díaz Grey.
But he not only wishes to imagine himself as someone else, he also seeks release from himself and from the world he knows. He leads many lives, some real and some fantastic, in order to experience a moment of psychic weightlessness - a ‘brief life’.
Reviews
‘Latin American literature has few secrets to divulge to the English speaking world, but one of them is the Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti’ Guardian
'Laconic, elegant, literary’ London Review of Books
‘Onetti’s novels and stories are the foundation stones of our modernity. To those of us who are his followers, he brings a lesson of narrative intelligence and of immense love for the literary imagination’ Carlos Fuentes