Los adioses

Los adioses / Farewells

Novel , 1954

Punto de Lectura

Pages: 128

'I am particularly fond of Farewells. I wrote it very quickly, with lots of love, even for the words. Some of my other works may be more literary. But I have a special feeling for it, I like it more.' Juan Carlos Onetti

In Farewells, a young international basketball player is dying of tuberculosis. His arrival at a sanatorium in a mountain holiday resort prompts speculative and, at times, vicious gossip among the guests. The narrator, café-owner cum shopkeeper, recalls the physical beauty of the dying sportsman with admiration and affection. The male nurse and hotel maid, the tubercular residents and the café clientele wonder over this enigmatic loner. Letters arrive... Two women visit –his wife and his mistress? He moves into a chalet... Making love in his condition? Is this a scandalous threesome? Incest? Or 'that oddity, the well-knit family'? Who can tell? Subtle detail, snatches of conversation and the café-owner's recollections create a mysterious network of unlikely relationships in 1950's Argentina.

"For many it is Onetti's masterpiece –he also often said that it was his favourite of his works– (...) I have read Los adioses many times, since I was twenty years old, and I am convinced that it is one of the two or three best short novels ever written in Spanish"." Antonio Muñoz Molina