A QUESTION OF BELONGING

Snapshot portraits of everyday life from an Argentinian maestra of keen observation.

Over a career spanning five decades, Uhart (1936-2018) published nearly two dozen stories, novels, travelogues, and tales, all of which exude the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement. This posthumous collection includes 27 crónicas (chronicles) that capture “undervalued stories—local histories, everyday wisdom, ways of expression,” as Mariana Enríquez says in the introduction. More than musings, but shy of full narratives, most entries are only a few pages, with a handful ranging to a dozen or more. In “Animals,” all of two pages, Uhart remarks on a neighbor, down on his luck, who walks his dog and regales the animal with tales of better times, promising to take it away from the “wailing sirens that tell us disaster is on its way.” While Uhart largely abstains from interjecting autobiographical details, two revealing entries bookend the collection. “A Memory From My Personal Life” recounts the author’s first home purchase, an apartment where she lived with an alcoholic boyfriend and was frequently visited by his drunken poet friends. Uhart teases with nighthawk shenanigans and eventual redemption, but ends instead on a quiet shrug: “He never did sober up, but I at least learned how to buy and sell apartments.” The penultimate crónica, “My Bed Away From Home,” is a surprisingly spry recollection of her last days in the hospital. Even with death impending, Uhart’s humor and wanderlust shine through: “I spent all of my time in the ICU thinking of the bathroom and its whereabouts, as though it were London or Paris.” Vilner’s thoughtful translation does much-deserved justice to Uhart’s cleareyed, boundless curiosity.

An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans.