Onetti. Juan Carlos Onetti.

Ana Mendoza

Cervantes Prize-Winning Author says that Uruguayan Onetti was "a superb short-story writer," comparable to Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner.

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa first discovered Juan Carlos Onetti's work in the 1970s and has been a big admirer of the late Uruguayan author ever since, regarding him as "one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language."

Vargas Llosa's high regard for the novelist and short story writer is palpable in his new essay, "El viaje a la ficcion. El mundo de Juan Carlos Onetti" (The Journey to Fiction: The World of Juan Carlos Onetti), which he presented Wednesday at Madrid's Casa de America cultural center.

In the book, which Alfaguara has just published in Spain and Latin America, Vargas Llosa analyzes in detail Onetti's life and work and offers "the most extraordinary map ever made of the improbable geography of Santa Maria," an imaginary territory that was the setting for many of the Uruguayan author's works, Spanish writer Juan Cruz said during the presentation ceremony.

The work of Onetti (1909-1994), like that of all great writers, can be analyzed "from a thousand different perspectives," said Cruz, who added that Vargas Llosa chose to focus on that "journey to the imagination and to fantasy" that the Uruguayan novelist undertakes in his books "in response to the failure of everyday life."

Vargas Llosa, although aware that Onetti that "would reject this interpretation," said he believes that the Uruguayan's work, "so detached from political, historical and social references," is representative of the world in which he happened to live.

"Faced with (the reality of) Latin America there's only one way out: fleeing, even if it's with one's imagination," said Vargas Llosa, who noted that Onetti's novels and short stories symbolize "frustration." None of his characters "can materialize their dreams or yearnings in any of the spheres of life experience."

"And isn't that the Latin America in which Onetti was born, wrote and lived? Isn't that the continent where all attempts to get ahead fail?" the Peruvian author asked rhetorically.

In Latin America, he said, attempts at democratization "fail over and over again; decent men are victimized by military strongmen, by soldiers, and the dishonest governments, thieves one after another, embark their countries on adventures that impoverish them."

That is the world, according to the novelist, that writers younger than Onetti have inherited.

In the book, the product of a six-month course that Vargas Llosa taught in 2006 at Georgetown University in Washington, the writer highlights "the modernity" that emanates from Onetti's first texts and says the Uruguayan was "a superb short-story writer," comparable to Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner.

According to Vargas Llosa, Faulkner had an enormous influence on Onetti, as he did on many other modern Latin American writers who borrowed from "the enormous wealth (of the U.S. author's) world" and the "technical genius with which he constructed his works."

Vargas Llosa has always been fascinated by the creation of great literary works and has dedicated books to "Madame Bovary," "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Les Miserables."

In the case of Onetti, he referred Wednesday to "El infierno tan temido" (Hell Most Feared), "the most extraordinary of his stories" and perhaps "the most disturbing exploration of the phenomenon of human evil."

That story actually sprung out of a mere anecdote that a Uruguayan president told Onetti, but in the author's hands it reached "extremes of unexpected lucidity" and of intuition about the nature of evil.