All in
the same boat
John Spurling
THE SHIPYARD by Juan Carlos Onetti, translated by Nick Caistor Serpent's Tail, f8.99, pp.186 Many Latin-American novelists have been called in the last 30 years, but few have made trumps with English readers. On the evidence of The Shipyard, Juan Carlos Onetti deserves to be among the few. Indeed Martin Seymour-Smith in his Herculean Guide to Modem World Literature considers him 'the greatest living urban novelist'. Onetti, once editor of a newspaper in Buenos Aires, is Uruguayan who now, aged over 80, lives in Madrid. The Shipyard, first published in 1961, is his only novel so far to be translated into English, originally in 1968 in an American edition and now by Nick Caistor for the Serpent's Tail series, `Extraordinary Classics'. The Shipyard shares its central character, Larsen (who appeared in a minor role in two much earlier novels), with Juntacadavres (Body- snatcher' or pimp), published in 1964, and both are set in or near the fictional town of Santa Maria on the River Plate.
Santa Maria is not much like Garcia Marquez's now famous Macondo, an altogether more tropical place of fast- growing myth, very tall stories and energetic decay. Santa Maria's decay is desultory, low-key and familiar (King's Cross and Caledonian Road spring to mind) and its down-at-heel characters are as incapable of telling tall stories as of believing them. The best they can manage is a sort of ironic collusion with„ each other's flights of optimism, an unspoken agreement not to puncture balloons too suddenly or publicly. All the main characters in The Shipyard live in their imagination and behave as if circumstances were less disastrous than they are, without ever really deceiving either the others or themselves. But if the characters some- times seem like refugees from Kafka's Castle and the constantly rained-on,
windblown settings are reminiscent of Conrad's, the tone is more Chekhovian. Neither thoughts nor conversations get anywhere much, nor does anybody finally do anything except leave, while the central character, Larsen — in a surely deliberate reference to Chekhov's well-known objection to pistols as dramatic devices several times takes his gun out of its shoulder-holster and keeps the reader on edge for a while, before putting it back unused.
The Shipyard is not, however, just a blend of others' vintages. One could cite resemblances to many famous brand- names and still declare Onetti's flavour unique, with its own strong aftertaste. When Larsen returns as a fat and thread- bare 50-year-old to the town from which he was banished as a pimp five years before (this story is told in Juntacadavres), his driving purpose is to re-integrate himself and retrieve his self-respect. He therefore sets out to woo the half-witted daughter of an old, fallen tycoon and accepts the job of General Manager of Jeremias Petrus' ship- yard. Since it's an identity and a role he's after rather than any real fortune, he is only partly distressed by the fact that the shipyard is rusting away, that his two underlings (the rest of the workforce having long since vanished) are selling whatever is moveable on the sly and that the salary is entered punctiliously in a ledger without ever being paid. Larsen sits day by day in a ruined office and goes through ancient files as if he were pulling the business round, knowing all the time that the bankrupt tycoon's assurance that he's about to obtain the necessary capital is as much of a game of the imagination as his own. He doesn't even really expect to get the girl, though he goes regularly to tea with her in a summerhouse in the decaying garden of her father's mansion.
A fantastic situation, perhaps, but handled with such quiet, unemphatic realism — sometimes using the Conradian device of piecing the facts together from unreliable eyewitness accounts, sometimes going right into the characters' minds with interior monologues — that it seems quite credible. And the more one savours it, the nearer the bone it comes: for isn't this a metaphor for the impossible survival of most of the economies of the world; for the absurd, self-imposed task of writing novels; for the life and work of almost any dis- illusioned person over 50? But because Larsen's struggle is not, after all, to save the shipyard but to save himself, because
human dignity, self-understanding and an odd, sideways sort of companionship with others are set against death and dissolu- tion, the story seems finally more heroic than nihilistic.
Is it a one-off masterpiece? I hope that, having reconstituted The Shipyard for
English readers, the translator and publish- er will decide to take the rust off the rest of Onetti's works.
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