I've always enjoyed obsessively reading the works of a single author, systematically working through a library's collection one or two at a time. In high school, it was Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel García Márquez. In college, I remember a month of Haruki Murakami and later a Roberto Arlt phase. Lately, I've been going through my library's Latin American collection and steadily reading through their holdings of books by authors like Roberto Bolaño, Felisberto Hernández and Antonio Di Benedetto. Juan Carlos Onetti is another one: lately I've been going up to the Uruguay section and checking out particularly compelling editions, like this one, a first edition of Los adioses, published in Buenos Aires in 1954. It had been hardbound by the library, but it still had the same plain yellow cover, the pages were old yet still crisp (certainly not worn from use), and the book felt good in my hands. I was excited to read it, and Los adioses leapfrogged to the front of my long queue of library books.

It's a short book, just under 90 pages. In it, a shop owner/bartender tells the story of a former star basketball player who came to his town in the mountains to convalesce after contracting tuberculosis. He lives in a hotel, and later rents a chalet on the mountainside where he spends his days. Some people think he's up there getting drunk, hiding from everyone. The town is small, and the constant inflow of patients gives the locals a constant source of gossip. They predict who's going to live and who's going to die, they monitor the temporary guests in their rural community, and they draw conclusions about these peoples' characters and lives. The basketball player receives letters from two different sources, and soon he's visited by two separate women, one after another. This, naturally, ratchets the gossip up a notch. As the two women visit a second time, the seasons also begin to change, with New Years coming and going (summer in the Southern Hemisphere), followed by an autumn chill in the air in the book's later pages. The man's condition follows the prognostications of a portion of those people who have been monitoring him and speculating about his health.

The constant question is: do I (the reader) trust the narrator's perspective? The story is built on speculation, rumors and hearsay. The shop owner has a limited number of interactions with the man he's observing. He's friends with a nurse who gives shots to the patients at the hotel, and they talk about the recently arrived man a lot. He drives one of the man's women to the hotel once, and sees both women as they stop by his store during their visits. However, he's not telling the story of people he knows and understands. They're strangers, and he's constructed lives out of the bits and pieces of them he sees. At the beginning of the story, and on a few other occasions, he describes a small portion of a person (the basketball player's hands are discussed for nearly the entire first page, with the bartender explaining that he would have liked to see nothing more than those hands, without seeing the attached person, the first time the man walked into the store), making a series of conclusions based on his observation of that portion of the individual. That initial page, the bartender explaining what he knew about the man by his hands, sets the tone for the next 87 pages, where he tells his interpretation of the story of the man's life, of which he's only seen brief and fleeting moments (and heard a series of rumors).

Also, you begin to wonder if maybe the narrator is telling his own story, or the story of his own fantasies, or the story of his own disgraces, through the tuburcular basketball player. How much has he projected onto the subject of his narration?

When the book ends, you know how the story ends, at least from the narrator's perspective. But you've been given enough information to question the truth of his interpretation, at so many different moments in the story and on so many different levels, that you can just as easily draw any number of other conclusions about what might have happened, and why it might have happened. As I was looking for some other readers' interpretations of this text, I came across an article by a woman named Mary-Lee Sullivan entitled "Projection as a narrative technique in Juan Carlos Onetti's Goodbyes" (http://www.onetti.net/es/descripciones/sullivan). She discusses a lot of the different critical interpretations of the text (Incest? Homosexuality? Self-projection?) and I found her article to be an excellent resource. I almost want to read the book again with the knowledge I now have about different possible interpretations of the text. One thing she mentioned was a back-and-forth between a critic, Wolfgang A. Luchting, and the author. The critic drew a conclusion, and Onetti congratulated him on unraveling a portion of the enigma, making it clear that there are other possibilities that the critic, like the narrator, may not have considered and may be just as possible. Los adioses asks the reader to interpret a story about a tall man with tuberculosis and two women in his life, while reading that story as told by a bartender, as written by Juan Carlos Onetti.

I think I agree with those who see this as one of Onetti's stronger works. He deftly wields a great number of narrational ambiguities in such a way that in the end the reader can believe he knows everything, he knows nothing, or something in between. Multiple readings could lead the reader down multiple paths, each one justifiably possible. ( )