SOURCE: "Juan Carlos Onetti, or the Shadows on the Wall," in Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers, Harper & Row, 1967, pp. 173-205.

Harss is a Chilean-born novelist, journalist, and critic. In the following excerpt from a study originally published by Harss in 1966 as Los Nuestros and subsequently translated with Dohmann, the critics survey Onetti's short fiction and, observing the miserable state of all his characters, note that "his pessimism seems to have become almost generic. "

Onetti, an ardent Arltian [i.e. strongly influenced by the writer Roberto Arlt], belongs to a "lost" generation that came of age around 1940, when the intellectual life of the country was being reassessed against a background of demagoguery and political disenchantment, of totalitarianism in Europe, and nationalism—with pro-Axis sympathies—in Argentina. In Uruguay a reactionary government ruled the country from 1933 to 1942, eroding faith in democracy as the corruption lurking under the monotonous...