SOURCE: "Onetti's Los adioses: A Cubist Reconstruction of Reality," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 173-81.

In the following excerpt, Maio maintains that the challenges that Los adioses poses to readers are similar to those that a cubist work of art presents to viewers.

A careful reading of Juan Carlos Onetti's Los adioses (1954) reveals unmistakable affinities between the aesthetic goals and structures of cubism and the narrative structure of his fiction. The bond that unites Onetti's prose to modern painting is not based on a narrative prose style that constructs visual images through intricate word patterns. Rather, Onetti's narrative style, the way in which he tells a story, indicates a structure and a process that have much in common not only with cubism but also with the aesthetics of contemporary art in general. . . .

[In Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature, 1960] Wylie Sypher writes...