Juan Carlos Onetti

En la novela el protagonista regresa a la ciudad que le expulsara de su seno, enfrentado a dos proyectos quiméricos. Obra maestra de Onetti, El astillero instaura, en el espacio corroído de depredación y deterioro que enuncia su título, una alegoría de la condición humana que es o puede ser a la vez la alegoría de un país y un tiempo concretos y una visión refleja de la esencial precariedad del hombre. Entre sus novelas, probablemente es la más equilibrada, la más perfecta. 

“En El astillero Onetti se acerca a un equilibrio casi perfecto, a una economía artística que resulta algo milagrosa.” Mario Benedetti

“In The Shipyard he found the absurd and compelling metaphor he had been looking for all his life, so that he was able to become something like a Conrad who had soaked himself in Beckett, or a Dashiell Hammett who had been reading Camus and Ionesco... Onetti denies having had any conscious allegorical intention in this work, any idea of picturing or prophesying the fate of Uruguay or Latin America, and I think we should take him at his word. But The Shipyard brilliantly catches a quite particular mentality, not confined to Latin America, but not peculiar to Larsen either. It involves what Larsen calls the acceptance of a farce as if it were a job, and there are many farces, public and private, that we go on playing out because we can’t bear the thought of what’s beyond them. If Larsen in The Shipyard is not an allegory, he does set in motion something like a fable, or parable. He is like a character in Kafka, only far shabbier: his life is not ours, but we can’t disavow him entirely, we have been in parallel places.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books