Sämtliche Erzählungen

The great novelist Juan Carlos Onetti spent his life writing stories, and his writing emerged from the need to tell tales. This volume contains all his narratives, from the early pieces that deliberately challenged the conventions of shallow empathy to the grand, complex narratives of his novels and the uniquely sketched narrative cores of his later years. Each story possesses its own form, yet the inner coherence of his narrative work is clearly evident. Not only do characters from his novels appear, but it also gradually becomes clear how Onetti's storytelling arises from a vital yet skeptical need to imagine another reality through narrative, all presented with an unprecedented concreteness of the visible, lived world. Juan Carlos Onetti, born in Montevideo in 1909, is, alongside Borges, another great author from the southern part of the American subcontinent. Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William Faulkner – Onetti repeatedly named the great novelists of the 20th century who 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 from imprisoning him for several months in 1974. After his release, he emigrated to Madrid, where he died in 1994. The Suhrkamp paperback includes the novels The Pit, No Man's Land, For This Night, The Short Life, Farewells, For a Grave Without a Name, The Shipyard, The Corpse Collector, Death and the Maiden, Let the Wind Speak, When Then and When It No Longer Matters, as well as a selection of his stories, The So-Called Hell. Anneliese Botond, editor.