La vida breve es la novela inaugural de Santa María, el territorio mítico de la narrativa onettiana.
Su protagonista, Brausen, escucha a través de una pared una conversación entre un hombre y una mujer. Imagina sus gestos, sus sentimientos… Brausen vive con su mujer, que una operación complicada dejó mutilada, y para compensar este vació físico que detendrá sus caricias, él imagina historias: la de Santa María, y la de un médico llamado Díaz Grey. Pero no sólo desea imaginar que es otro, también quiere serlo.
«Las novelas y cuentos de Onetti son las piedras de fundación de nuestra modernidad. A todos sus descendientes nos dio una lección de inteligencia narrativa, de construcción sabia, de inmenso amor a la imaginación literaria.» CARLOS FUENTES
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
A new commemorative edition offered by the RAE and ASALE on the 30th anniversary of the author’s death: the novel that brought modernism to literature written in Spanish language.
In La vida breve / A Brief Life, Onetti delves into the power of imagination and writing as salvation, and the interplay between reality and fiction, using the creation of parallel existences as a means of escaping reality. The protagonist attempts to escape his life, marked by a broken marriage and his wife’s illness, by giving birth to another fictional self. Some critics consider this the novel that gave birth to the Latin American Boom. In it, Onetti shapes, for the first time, that imaginative realm where his novels unfold: the mythical Santa María, one of the richest and best-constructed literary universes, alongside Rulfo’s Comala and García Márquez’s Macondo.
This edition includes supplementary texts from authors such as Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Gonzalo Celorio, Hortensia Campanella, and other critics well-versed in Onetti’s world.
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