Juan Carlos Onetti

Larsen, conocido como Juntacadáveres, llega a Santa María con Irene, Nelly y María bonita, tres prostitutas entradas en años con las que monta un burdel. No se trata de un lugar cualquiera, dedicado al simple desahogo sexual, o al menos eso es lo que pretende Larsen. Allí, gracias al saber hacer de las viejas meretrices, los hombres conocerán el paraíso y alcanzarán la felicidad. Esta excéntrica empresa se topa con la oposición implacable de las gentes de bien, como el padre Bergner, cuyos sermones incendiarán los ánimos de los parroquianos.

“Like a South American Faulkner [...] this masterful novel ranks with the fictions of Puig, Cortázar and Márquez. His serpentine lyricism tempered by whiplash irony, Onetti is an elegist of the 20th century, its neuroses, sexual repression, mafias, anti-Semitism, office time-clocks and terminal lives.” Publishers Weekly

“Onetti reads a bit like Faulkner, his hero. Both writers invented a place and, in novel after novel, peopled it with the same characters. Both Faulkner and Onetti get the metaphysical chills; they are equally astonished by the mere habit of being alive. Similarly, both writers’ characters are almost caricatures, woodcuts rather than watercolors. [...] The very beauty and startling unpredictability of his prose attest to his devotion to something—possibly art alone.” Harper Magazine

“Body Snatcher offers an edgy comment on the vanity of human wishes, memorably mingles sarcasm and pathos... This book is frankly phantasmagoric, a detailed report on an extraordinary folly, but it is written with the bemused intimacy we all have with our own moments of craziness. It is, to evoke Conrad again, like Heart of Darkness in slow motion, and irreparably cut off from anything resembling mundane or practical reality. A man steps into a fantasy which others play along with, and which nothing, strictly, contradicts or confirms... The triumph of the book is the agility and ingenuity and wry sympathy with which Onetti evokes this astonishing and desperate game, this story of a ‘fat, obsessed man’ in ‘a ruined, unlikely office’.” Michael Wood, London Review of Books