SOURCE: Brotherston, Gordon. “Survival in the Sullied City: Juan Carlos Onetti.” In The Emergence of the Latin American Novel, pp. 60-70. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

In the following essay, Brotherston discusses Onetti as an urban novelist.

He shrugged and raised his head and moved off in the direction of the unchanging sky-blue of the curtains, in the cloudy and undecided Sunday morning. He knocked on the door with the butt of his pistol and we waited for a while. The youngest girl, the round-faced blonde, slipped back a bolt and looked at us, sleepy and calm, as if she had been expecting us.

‘Good morning,’ she murmured towards the pistol in Marcos's hand.

We went in, blinded by the half-light, and saw in turn the tables, the pictures on the walls, the withered forgotten flowers and the hostile doors of the bedrooms. A second later we...