A Brief Life

Juan Carlos Onetti · 1909–1994 · Uruguay

Originally La vida breve (Spanish)

Why it matters

An advertising copywriter, his marriage collapsing, invents an alter ego and a film script that lets him live a second, secret life next door. Introduces Santa María, the invented town Onetti would inhabit for decades, and the Boom's acknowledged precursor in interior defeat.

At a glance

Nested fictions-within-fictions and a deliberately evasive narrator obscure where reality ends and invention begins.