La vida breve (Onetti)
La vida breve ( The Short Life ) is a novel by Juan Carlos Onetti from 1950. The work is generally regarded as the most important pioneer of the modern Latin American novel.
action
The protagonist Juan María Brausen is in a deep life crisis. At forty, life seems to have nothing to offer him: he is relatively unsuccessful as a copywriter, shy and leads a pitiful ascetic existence with the only woman who has ever seduced him. While writing a script, he invents a doppelganger, the small town doctor Díaz Gray, whose life he begins to lead. He is increasingly breaking out of his previous bourgeois existence and getting more and more entangled in a world full of prostitutes, crime and drugs, but also full of love and desire.
- Extracts
“I disappeared on the indefinite day on which my love for Gertrudis ended; I lived on in the secret double life of Arce and the provincial doctor. [...] I was born again when I inhaled the changing smells of the room, when I threw myself on the bed to drink gin while listening to the marginal notes and news that Queca's voice droned down and the already familiar laugh [...] . "
“In the meantime I hardly worked anymore and only existed: I was Arce during the regular drinking with the Queca, during the growing pleasure of beating it, while amazed that it was easy and a need for me; I was Díaz Gray, I wrote about him [...]. "
publication
- Juan Carlos Onetti: The Short Life. Translated from Spanish by Curt Meyer-Clason . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-37161-4 .