Adolescent Onetti

Abstract

The author of this paper tries to install his writing in both viewpoints: one predominantly literary, the other slightly analytical and distant. Juan Carlos Onetti is one of the greatest modern universal writers. His influence is growing every day in young narrators of Spanish, French and English speaking. He drank from different vivifying sources: Faulkner, Proust, Joyce, Céline, Arlt, Nabokov, perhaps Nietzsche, Freud perhaps. And also the painters Joaquín Torres García, Cézanne, Rousseau, Gauguin. His writing was not mimetic, figurative, realistic. But it was a darkly, beautiful and poetic writing. His recurrent subject was the loss of innocence of men and women, especially women, during the years of childhood and youth. He wanted to preserve his loneliness to read and write, in an incessant and indefatigable way. The writer confessed he was always a loner, a skeptic, a dreamer. He liked to quote Santa Teresa de Avila: «I live without living in me».