Customer Reviews

The Shipyard

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This is a grim, gloomy and creepy but strangely attractive novel, very much representative of sixties' angst and the feeling that spread over the world during that time: the void of existence. This stream produced very good -and very bad- books, some of the best being those of Camus and a few others. Onetti is certainly one of the least known -especially outside the Spanish-speaking world- and best writers of this generation.

"The Shipyard" is the miserable story of a defeat foretold, to paraphrase García-Márquez, whose style is so far away from that of Onetti. Larsen, a fiftysomething man, is back in the fictitious Uruguayan town of Santa María, after five years of exile imposed by the governor. He is workless and depressed, but nonetheless he has a plan: to become General Manager of the local shipyard, owned by one Jeremías Petrus, and marry this guy's dumb daughter. And so he proceeds with his plan, showing up everydat at work, where he only interacts with his two co-workers, two men with no history and no future who seem to dislike him but nevertheless share meals with him. There is really nothing to do at the shop, since the business has been bankrupt for a number of years. Petrus insists the shipyard will be back in business soon, but we readers know it will never happen.

Is this novel any good? I say yes. Of course, as a philosophical school Existentialism is condemned to failure, ... -if it's true that life has no possible meaning at all. The characters are unlikable, with the possible exception of Larsen himself in a strange fashion. There is really no plot and we all know right from the start that the novel can not have any happy ending. Where is then the strength of the book? Well, in that it is very well written. Onetti reveals himself as a truly good creator of moods, environments, images. He has the power of taking you right there and making you see, hear and smell the same as the characters. His prose is direct, straight and non-experimental, thank God, since his is no magical realism at all but pure, crude and rude realism. The interest of the reader is sustained by the curiosity to see what will become of poor but somehow brave Larsen. I would say that, as far as Existentialism was able to produce good writing, this is one of the best bets you have.

It's a shame that Onetti's oeuvre is almost unknown outside the Spanish-speaking countries, maybe because it is the complete opposite of the much popular magic realism and the way we think about Latin-American literature in general. His most famous work, The Shipyard could have been written by an European author, and even its setting could be anywhere in the world, it is so out of time and place. There are no examples of tropical flora or fauna here, and the story is also opposed to the Marquez-like swirling of fascinating anecdotes and fantastic stories. It simply tells the story of Larsen a. k. a. Juntacadaveres, or Corpse Collector (who earned his name because he ran a brothel with ugly and old prostitutes) returning to his hated city, and get a job in a wrecked shipyard, out of service from years and then... nothing happens. Still this nothing is fascinatingly described in long, carefully written sentences. All the characters in the story are old, ugly and tired, they try to do something but halfway they realise that everything is worthless. They know that everything they do is only part of a farce just like running a factory that had been bankrupted long ago. There are no real dialogues here, the recurring phrase during this fake dialogues is He lied This may sound depressing and it is depressing, not recommended for those who hope the best days of their life are only coming. But it is also a great mirror to our behaviour, how we stick to things we know are not true, how we want to believe in things that are long gone.

This is a Latin American classic read in most literature courses.
Best read in Spanish. The detailed use of words helps to better describe and understand the complete picture, the actions are relfected as a small part of what goes on.
Im no critic, just an interested reader and wish for all to take an interest in this book