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Onetti was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He was the son of Carlos Onetti, a customs official, and Honoria Borges, who belonged to a Brazilian aristocratic family from the state of Rio Grande do Sul.[1] He had two siblings: an older brother Raul, and a younger sister Rachel.
The original surname of his family was O'Nety (of Irish or Scottish origin). The writer himself commented: "the first to come here, my great-great-grandfather, was English, born in Gibraltar. My grandfather was the one who italianized the name".[2]
Career
A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939,[3] met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 1960s, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Aged 30, Onetti was already working as editing secretary of the famous weekly Uruguayan newspaper Marcha. He had lived for some years in Buenos Aires, where he published short stories and wrote cinema critiques for the local media, and met and befriended novelist and journalist Roberto Arlt, author of the novels El juguete rabioso, Los siete locos, Los lanzallamas.[4]
In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. "The bodyguard") as the winner of Marcha's annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't do so due to its sensitive political themes.[6]
Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers -including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti – signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay.[7]
As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violinist Dorothea Muhr.[8] There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death there in 1994.[9] He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.[10]
^Ardila, J. A. G., ed. (2015). The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature : From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque. J. A. G. Ardila. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 241. ISBN978-1-107-03165-4.
^Magill, Frank N (1984). Critical Survey of Long Fiction: Foreign language series. Vol. 3. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press. p. 1209. ISBN978-0-89356-369-1.
^King, John (2007). The Role of Mexico's Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 99–101. ISBN978-0-2306-0968-6.
^Santoni, Pedro (2008). Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Latin America : From the Wars of Independence to the Central American Civil Wars. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 240. ISBN9780313055003.
^Morse, Kimberly J., ed. (2022). The Americas : An Encyclopedia of Culture and Society. Kimberly J. Morse. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood Press. p. 925. ISBN978-1-4408-5238-1.
^Rocca, Pablo (2005). El 45 : entrevistas/testimonios (in Spanish). Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental. p. 19. ISBN978-9974-103-66-5.
^International Institute of Ibero-American Literature (1939). "Revista iberoamericana". Revista iberoamericana (in Spanish). 60 (168–169): 1185. ISSN0034-9631 – via WorldCat.
^Kadir, Djelal (1977). Juan Carlos Onetti. Boston: Twayne Publishers. p. 15. ISBN9780805763102.
^Cohn, Deborah; Smith, Jon, eds. (2004). Look Away! : The U.S. South in New World Studies. Donald E. Pease, George B. Handley. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 415. ISBN978-0-8223-8577-6.
