• A Dream Come True
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Archipelago Books

A Dream Come True

A Dream Come True

by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

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Mario Vargas Llosa referred to Juan Carlos Onetti as “one of the great modern writers, not only in Latin America.” A hero to the likes of Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez and a vital forbearer to magical realism, Onetti won the Cervantes Prize in 1980. A Dream Come True,beautifully translated by Katherine Silver, gathers Onetti’s entire body of short fiction into English for the first time.

Onetti’s characters drift untethered, through strange places with unfamiliar people. A woman idles in a beachside hotel during a prolonged convalescence; a grandmother serves café-con-leche to schoolboys resembling her lost grandson. In these mysterious, dream-like stories, everything is gestured at, nothing plainly told. Each offers a brief glimpse into the life of one of Onetti’s vast cast of unusual characters, intimately rendering their sorrows, fears, and joys.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810465
Pages: 560
Publication Date:

Praise

In a bold gesture of defiance toward the current standardization of literary contents on reading lists, Archipelago Books has published A Dream Come True—Katherine Silver’s fearsomely loyal, clean, and brilliant translation of the complete short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti....Onetti was free of the continental love affair with abstract conclusions...his sentences never surrender their narrative vigor to aphoristic simplification...Onetti’s stories feel existential if one reads them in a loose way: extraordinarily well written theme-and-variations about senseless lives in a remote South American port. Nevertheless, as they accumulate in our memory, they distill a scary political meaning that contemporary Americans may find disquietingly familiar.
—Álvaro Enrigue

Every tale in (A Dream Come True) has the air of a detective story; it is guesswork. Characters tell tales, of themselves and of others; read traces and clues; listen to gossip; gather the pieces of the puzzling stories...When you read Onetti, you will find that time stops in order that you may explore its meaning. And at those moments, life will seem richer and more intense.
—Christina Soto van der Plas, Public Books

Archipelago Books’ monumental collection of Onetti’s stories, A Dream Come True, spans over 54 years of the author’s dense and difficult to work...Onetti is never satisfied with any singular meaning...How fortunate, then, that Onetti has Katherine Silver rendering his absurd theatrics, a translator whose vocabulary and rhythm provide the engine of this collection...Onetti’s tone is perfectly deadpan, skewering the malaise of the young and rich, their poverty of thought, and their total indifference to humanity...this collection [has] a truly complete feeling.
—Spencer Ruchti, Three Percent

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