Death and the girl

"The Death and the Maiden" is the story of a foretold death. Reluctantly, he goes around telling the world about his future crime: murder, manslaughter, spousal murder, thinks Dr. Díaz Grey about his visitor, Jorge Malabia, who sits before him with his absurd confession. But words can deceive, even the one who utters them; this is what the fundamentally skeptical Díaz Grey knows, and in a later conversation with another interlocutor, he struggles to find words for his innermost, loneliest experience. With just a few characters, Onetti creates a world illuminated by an existential fury: Judgment Day, farce, crime novel, world theater between an untrusted heaven and an untrusted but present hell. With the intensity of chamber music, in the tightest of spaces, he tells an unfathomable story. Juan Carlos Onetti, born in Montevideo in 1909, is, alongside Borges, the other great author from the southern part of the American subcontinent. Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William Faulkner - Onetti has repeatedly named the great novelists of the 20th century who have influenced him. Subsequent generations of writers have significantly oriented themselves around him, not only in Latin America. His slowly but steadily growing fame did not prevent the military government in 1974 from imprisoning him for several months. He emigrated to Madrid, where he died in 1994. In the Suhrkamp paperback series, the novels "The Pit," "No Man's Land," "For This Night," "The Short Life," "Farewells," "For a Grave Without a Name," "The Shipyard," "Grave Collectors," "Let the Wind Speak," "When Then" and "When It No Longer Matters," as well as a selection of his stories, "The So Feared Hell," have been published. Jürgen Dormagen, editor, publisher of the collected works of Onetti.