A Dream Come True

"Time and circumstance, and the particular bend of prevailing literary history, have all but buried Onetti’s fiction in English. And if left unaccounted for, his work–to his readers in translation anyway–is perhaps in danger of being worn away. Onetti himself once admitted that his reign was not of this world; at the time, he hadn’t intended that to be a warning." — Jonathan Blitzer, The Nation "Onetti had the strange quality of being inimitable and at the same time creating an entire school of writing. All of his descendants, myself included, received from him a lesson on narrative intelligence, on wise construction, on an immense love to literary imagination, on risk and irony." - Carlos Fuentes "Onetti is the first modern writer in our language...His world is a dark one, highly pessimistic, with a vision of the human condition that is profoundly desperate, and which we would reject if it didn't reach us with such a wonderful language...I can assure you that, without the great books that I've read, among which I can count Onetti's books, my life would have been infinitely poorer." - Mario Vargas Llosa "Onetti is an epiphany, a celebration of beauty, of emotion and tenderness." - Antonio Muñóz Molina "Onetti's writing is so good, a mere sentence by him will give you goosebumps. If I had to sell my soul to the devil in order to write a sentence in Spanish like someone else, I would think about very few authors: Borges, Onetti." - Carlos Gamerro "Onetti's writing knew that literature is creation, that creation is reality and not repetition or recreation, that it is about finding a good story to tell and then tell it beautifully." - Carlos Liscano