A Brief Life

Book Name in English : A Brief Life

In A Brief Life, Juan Carlos Onetti's protagonist, Brausen, is caring for his wife after a long illness. To compensate for the physical void which temporarily stalls their caresses, Brausen eavesdrops on the conversation of his neighbors, a husband and wife, imagining their gestures and their expressions. But he not only wishes to imagine himself as someone else, he also seeks release from the world he knows. He leads many lives, some real and some fantastic, in order to experience a moment of psychic weightlessness—a “brief life.” Juan Carlos Onetti is acknowledged as one of the great Latin American writers of the twentieth century. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1909. His novels include The Well, No Man's Life, and his best known work, The Shipyard. He was awarded Uruguay's national literature prize in 1963 and Spain's Cervantes Prize in 1980. Onetti died in 1994.