Juan Carlos Onetti

The Shipyard chronicles an anti-hero named Larsen who returns to a fictional place, Santa María, to try to revive a useless and abandoned shipyard. With all the enthusiasm of a man condemned to be hanged, Larsen takes up his new post. Like the other workers at the shipyard, he routinely goes through the motions. Every so often, his sense of reality is shaken by a tremor of self-deception and then it is possible to believe that the yard's glory is not just a thing of the past. In spite of its melancholy and sense of alienation, Onetti's novel conveys, through its unique poetic language, a real sense of transcendence and hope. Allegorical, reflecting the decay and breakdown of Uruguayan society and modern urban life, The Shipyard is a landmark of Latin American literature.

“In The Shipyard, Onetti achieves an almost perfect balance, an artistic economy that seems almost miraculous.” 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