A Question of Belonging

March 15, 2024
Snapshot portraits of everyday life from an Argentinian maestra of keen observation. Over a career spanning five decades, Uhart (1936-2018) published nearly two dozen stories, novels, travelogues, and tales, all of which exude the author's characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement. This posthumous collection includes 27 cr�nicas (chronicles) that capture "undervalued stories--local histories, everyday wisdom, ways of expression," as Mariana Enr�quez says in the introduction. More than musings, but shy of full narratives, most entries are only a few pages, with a handful ranging to a dozen or more. In "Animals," all of two pages, Uhart remarks on a neighbor, down on his luck, who walks his dog and regales the animal with tales of better times, promising to take it away from the "wailing sirens that tell us disaster is on its way." While Uhart largely abstains from interjecting autobiographical details, two revealing entries bookend the collection. "A Memory From My Personal Life" recounts the author's first home purchase, an apartment where she lived with an alcoholic boyfriend and was frequently visited by his drunken poet friends. Uhart teases with nighthawk shenanigans and eventual redemption, but ends instead on a quiet shrug: "He never did sober up, but I at least learned how to buy and sell apartments." The penultimate cr�nica, "My Bed Away From Home," is a surprisingly spry recollection of her last days in the hospital. Even with death impending, Uhart's humor and wanderlust shine through: "I spent all of my time in the ICU thinking of the bathroom and its whereabouts, as though it were London or Paris." Vilner's thoughtful translation does much-deserved justice to Uhart's cleareyed, boundless curiosity. An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2024
Acclaimed Argentinian writer Uhart (1936-2018) traveled widely, observing and chronicling everyday life in cities and small towns across Latin America. In this superb, posthumous collection of 27 short crónicas (chronicles), she casts her curious, insightful gaze on odd yet ordinary encounters: traveling by train with an eccentric priest, buying a suit for an alcoholic boyfriend, avoiding souvenir vendors at Gabriel Garcia M�rquez's birthplace, and meeting a local Indigenous political boss in Uruguay. Language fascinated Uhart. She avidly collected local expressions and phrases, particularly Creole ones. Her "tender and playful" voice conjures the essence of people and places in elegantly spare descriptive detail: a young woman's languid perch on an upper berth embodies mystique; a North American's nonstop complaints become a "speech without cracks;" Rio's rather formal vernacular is a mix of Latin and ""fanciful gaucho."" A philosophical seam runs through Uhart's seemingly simple accounts of daily life. In one crónica, a man and his dog both appear composed. On the man, composure projects self-control, but on the leashed dog, composure looks ""a bit like resignation.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 22, 2024
This sparkling collection of short stories and travelogues by Argentinian writer Uhart (1936–2018; Animals) brims with sharp observations and self-deprecating humor. In “Around the Corner,” Uhart observes a drunk Englishman in Cartagena, Colombia: “He seemed to be traveling the world chained to hotel restaurants and bars, as if the world were just an old house he knew inside and out, unworthy of even the slightest glance.” In “My Bed Away from Home,” she considers from her vantage point as a patient the small everyday dramas of a hospital, where “you turn into an unrecognizable tyrant who wants someone to pick up the reading glasses you dropped on the floor.” “Rio Is a State of Mind” centers on a wigmaker who plans to dance at Carnival, despite attending a church that warns of “Carnival’s sins and its offense to God,” which prompts the wigmaker to add, without a hint of irony, “Carnival is very lovely, but the priest says lovely things too!” Uhart shines in her nuanced portrayal of all-too-human moments. There’s much to admire in this understated collection.