A brief life
/ by Juan Carlos Onetti ; translated from the Spanish by Hortense Carpentier
- New York : Grossman Publishers , 1976.
- viii, 292 p. ; 22 cm.
Translation of La vida breve.
Uruguayan writer Juan Maria Brausen interprets his name as three words mechanically strung together by his father so that the trivialities he has inherited would be repeated after him. Brausen's wife, Gertrudis, has undergone a mastectomy, and although he misses making love to her, he is incapable of empathy regarding her new condition. In fact, the sight of her scar so repulses him that he begins to flit between reality and fantasy. Through paper-thin walls, he eavesdrops on his neighbors' sexual trysts, mentally inserting himself in their world and imagining a new character, an enema-giving Dr. Diaz Grey, in the make-believe town of Santa Maria. Scenes are re-created endlessly in the hopes of getting them just right for the film script Brausen is destined never to finish.