The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti
Uruguayan fiction
Original title –El astillero
Translator – Nick Caistor
Source – Personal copy
I haven’t focused this year much on Latin American fiction as I have in other years. But I had read this book a few months ago. I have wanted to read Onetti for a while, a high school dropout who worked for a newspaper after he published his first novel. He was a friend of the Argentine writer Robert Arlt, a writer I need to get to next year. Onetti was also imprisoned for six months, but a campaign was held by a number of the leading Latin American writers of the day, Marquez, Lhosa and Benedetti. After this, he relocated and spent the rest of his life in Spain.
Larsen again gauged the hostility and mockery on the immobile faces of the two waiting men. To challenge and repay hatred might give his life a meaning, a habit, some pleasure; almost anything would be better than this roof with its leaky sheet iron, these dusty, lopsided desks, the heaps of files and folders stacked against the walls, the thorny vines winding themselves round the iron bars of the gaping window, the exasperating, hysterical farce of work, enterprise, and prosperity that the furniture spoke of (though now it was vanquished by use and moths, rushing towards its destiny as firewood); the documents made filthy by rain, sun and footprints, the rolls of blueprints stacked in pyramids all torn and tattered on the walls.
Further on the despaier is there a little more
The book is set in the fictional town of Santa Maria, a setting where Onetti set much of his fiction. The book follows a man returning to the city after five years in Exile, brought back to try and get the failing shipyard back into action. The man, Larsen, heads into the yard full of ideas. Still, as he works through the yard and the blueprints of old ships and past glories, there is a deep sense of how this is a place that has gone beyond the point of no return. The decay of an industrial place can be as fast as the lack of work and bleakness is caught in the various other people we glimpse in the book.As we see how this all hits Larsen
So Larsen was already under the spell, his fate decided, when he went into Belgrano’s the next day to have lunch with Galvez and Kunz. It was never entirely clear whether he chose to head the monthly wages list with five or six thousand pesos. In fact, his choice of one or the other figure could only have mattered to Galvez, who typed out several copies on the 25th of each month, stopping every now and then to furiously rub his bald patch. Every 25th of the month, he once again discovered, was forced to recognise, the repeated, permanent absurdity he was in the grip of. This realisation made him break off, stand up, and pace about the huge deserted office, hands behind his back, his brown scarf wrapped round his neck, pausing at the drawing board where Kunz was always ready with his hollow, silent, exasperated laugh.
I loved the style of this book. I was reminded of the Hilbig books. Similar to his book, there is a sense of a place on the edge of decay, a man with a hopeless task, which brought back memories of the main character in Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe. On a personal front, I was reminded of a friend of my father who was in charge of a shipyard in the Tyne, which, like here, was in steep decline. How hard ot can be to turn back an operation like a shipyard when the decay is already there. What remains all these weeks after is how futile Larsen’s job is and the despair that it can bring to one man. Have you read this book or any others by Onetti? If so, which one to try next?
For Fans of –
Wolfgang Hilbig, I have reviewed two books by him
Also, The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzzati
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