A Question of Belonging

Description

“An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans . . . [that] exudes the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement.” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review

25 Crónicas – uniquely Latin American short stories – from a master of the form, a star heralded alongside Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez for blending insight, honesty, and humor

Uhart reinvigorates our desire to connect with other people, to love the world, to laugh in the face of bad intentions, and to look again, more closely: from lapwings, road-side pedicures, and the overheard conversations of nurses and their patients, to Goethe and the work of the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés.

“It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes,” Hebe Uhart writes in the opening story of A Question of Belonging, a collection of texts that traverse Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and beyond. Discoveries sprout and flower throughout Uhart’s oeuvre, but nowhere more so than in her crónicas, Uhart’s preferred method of storytelling by the end of her life. For Uhart, the crónica meant going outside, meeting others. It also allowed the mingling of precise, factual reportage and the slanted, symbolic narrative power of literature.

Here, Uhart opens the door on all kinds of people. We meet an eccentric priest who conducts experiments down by the riverside hoping to land on a cure for cancer; a queenly (read: beautiful and relentlessly indolent) teenage girl; a cacique of the Pueblo Nación Charrúa clan, who tells her of indigenous customs and histories.

She writes with characteristic slyness. In the last lines of the title story, Uhart writes, “And I left, whistling softly.” Wherever she may have gone, we are left with the wish we could follow alongside.”Over a career spanning five decades, Uhart published nearly two dozen stories, novels, travelogues, and tales, all of which exude the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement . . . 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.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“There is a way to capture the movements of reality, without a violent fight, that’s nevertheless powerful. With her singular voice, Hebe Uhart is constantly seen, heard and present in her crónicas, and yet there’s a grace in the way she occupies the space she’s meditating upon; she is at once too vast and too small for autobiography. Anna Vilner’s translation is eloquently luminous.” — Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know
 
“If Hebe Uhart had to be characterized in one way, it would be by her complete lack of pretension and artificiality, by her extreme discomfort when asked to carry out the rituals of the consecrated writer.” — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night and Things We Lost in the Fire
 
“Seemingly naïve but tremendously sharp, Hebe Uhart’s vision is one that could belong to a child, but a child who has up her sleeve the reflective tools of an adult.” — Alejandra Costamagna, The Paris Review
 
“Paul Klee famously described drawing as taking a line for a walk and the stories of Hebe Uhart share that spirit, that magic. Deceptively simple, also philosophical, Uhart’s work is brilliant and companionable.” — Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Born in 1936 in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Hebe Uhart is one of the most original voices in the Spanish language. She is best known for her short stories exploring the lives of ordinary characters in small towns. Her Collected Stories won the Buenos Aires Bookfair Prize (2010), and she received Argentina’s National Endowment of the Arts Prize (2015) for her trajectory as well as the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Prize (2017). Her writing, which presents a characteristically criollo language, is identified with a quirky, understated syntax that constructs an odd perspective on the quotidian life in South America. Uhart died in 2018.

Anna Vilner is a Russian-born American translator. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas-Austin. Her translations can be found in World Literature Today, The Massachusetts Review, Columbia Journal, and The Common.Introduction
 
Hebe Uhart loved to travel. Born in the town of Moreno, in the Buenos Aires province, she considered herself a writer of the outskirts. Her childhood home had been a sad one. An aunt who had severe psychiatric problems. A brother who died young. A little cousin, who she lost to a heart condition; another cousin, to a plane accident. Her mother, who suffered from depression. The hecatomb of grief. At a very young age, she became a rural school teacher. She’d bring the kids reading material; she would also bring them clothes. The school only offered primary education, and it was out in the country. One-story houses, this was back in the 70s. It was there, she told me in an interview, where she learned about “the things of life.” “I was quite fickle and restless, I believed I could do things I couldn’t. I had fits of wanting to do extraordinary things. Going to the country school helped me mature. I realized that I’d had my head in the clouds, dreaming of scholarships, of travels to Paris. And I realized there were others who made sacrifices, who supported their homes. Who hitchhiked because they couldn’t afford to take the bus. I was ashamed of my own thinking, of being so self-centered. It was then when I started to ripen. Some people never ripen, not even at 40. They go on demanding things and blaming their parents.”
        This was also when the urge to travel came over her, and she began doing so with her students. When she could, she traveled alone: to Bolivia by train, as a teenager, a journey not many girls would have taken at the time, but Hebe was so unlike most people I have met in my life: she was brave, curious, carefree, sure of herself. Yet, as a traveler, she didn’t like going to big cities–they unsettled her (despite having visited many, of course). She preferred small towns. Places that were easy to get to know. Because what she loved was talking to people. These trips, day trips, in general (she referred to herself as a “domestic” chronicler) were a search for different ways of expression, a search that would take on the contours of the place itself.
        Hebe Uhart’s work as a collector of expressions and turns of phrase is a fortunate one for us, and important, because she is not merely a collector of the curiosities she observes, but a writer. Sometimes she learns things. In “Off to Mexico” she goes around Guadalajara, trying to understand the “thousands of things I’d read about and didn’t understand, for example ‘ni madres,’ which is another way of saying, ‘no way.’ ‘Ese viejo se las truena’ (he’s high) or ‘vete a la chingada,’ (you are being sent off to some distant, indeterminate place).” In the crónica “Río is a State of Mind,” she notes: “Cariocas do not seem to care for categorical definitions, and they are not eager to point out the difference between how things are and how they should be. My conversations went more or less like this: ‘There should be a crosswalk on this street, it’s a dangerous intersection.’ Someone in Portuguese: ‘There should be one, yes, but there isn’t.’” 
Her fascination with language is not limited to the spoken: she roams around cities and towns taking note of shop names, ads, and graffiti, a routine that is repeated in almost every crónica. In “The Land of Formosa,” a newspaper helps her understand the place’s humor: “I only manage to read the literary supplement written by readers of the paper. One person has written an ode to his eyeglasses, praising their usefulness. The final line: ‘Little lens, I love you so!’ A celebratory and grateful spirit abounds.” She is also concerned with the types of orality closest to literature and another vital source is television. If Hebe Uhart had to be characterized in one way, it would be by her complete lack of pretension and artificiality, by her extreme discomfort when asked to carry out the rituals of the consecrated writer. It would have never occurred to her to discount television: such attitudes astonished her. One rainy day in the capital city of Paraguay, Asunción, a city she adored, she writes from inside her hotel: “The reporter on the bilingual channel appears, speaking Guarani again. He blends it with Spanish and says ‘satélite intersat.’ He’s clever like you wouldn’t believe and moves around like an eel, or as if he had ants in his ass.”
As traveler and chronicler, Hebe Uhart has her routines. She considers the hotel a refuge. If she goes to a neighboring city, for example, going back to the hotel is, for her, like going home. Another indispensable place is the café; if she doesn’t spot one right away, she sets out on a desperate search. The café acts as a road stop: a place to light up a cigarette, flip through a newspaper, observe the regulars and those who pass by her window or table, if she happens to be sitting outside. She’s stealthy, as well, and stays only for a short while: there is so much to absorb, no time to lose. Nevertheless, there is no sense of urgency in her crónicas. Her relationship to the places she visits and their people is easygoing: she knows that her presence is a curiosity, but she takes care not to intrude. Whenever possible, she visits a residence, a school, a library; she talks to artists and local historians and looks for books that help her understand the place. A list of her cited authors and references would be endless; it would also be extremely eclectic: Charles Darwin and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento are usual referents; Alejandra Costamagna, Diego Zúñiga, and Alejandro Zambra, young Chilean writers, and friends of hers, show up in Santiago; she gives cameos to Peruvians Alfredo Bryce Echenique and Julio Ramón Ribeyro for being her favorites. In Asunción, she relies on Rafael Barrett and the great poet Elvio Romero; in Bariloche, local writers Luisa Peluffo and Graciela Cros; in Minas, Uruguay, her beloved Juan José Morosoli; in Guadalajara, the Popol Vuh. She barely mentions, however, her greatest influence: Fray Mocho, writer and journalist of the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, who recorded popular porteño speech and the changing customs brought on by the population boom, and observed—with a sharp eye, playfully and without pretension—the society that fascinated him.
            In interviews and library visits, Hebe Uhart consults local historians, those great forgotten or undervalued ones with whom she identifies. She buys their books and familiarizes herself with pioneer chroniclers and specialists, from Clifton Kroeber, author of River Trade and Navigation in the Plata Region to Miguel Donoso Pareja, who wrote Ecuador: Identity and Schizophrenia. She consults hundreds of books like these, both contemporary and academic, written by chroniclers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Uhart is voracious but offers all of this information considerately; she does not wish to overwhelm her readers, but to draw their attention to that which—due to its closeness—may have gone unnoticed by them. Each one of these crónicas is a sort of melancholic wake-up call, a gentle wave from the pampa, a hand that beckons and shows us that our own stories are complex, beautiful—we only need someone willing to listen.
            I remember an anecdote, its setting a small town in the Buenos Aires province. This was where we became friends. I was, of course, a lot younger than she was. I don’t feel as though I was the “chosen one.” A lot of her friends were younger. She liked spending time with writers outside her generation. And it was easy to get to know Hebe because she enjoyed talking about flowers or politics more than literary prizes. Back to the anecdote: A tour guide from a town in the Buenos Aires province, one of those enthusiastic types she was drawn to, was leading her through the rooms of a country house. The guide was describing the climate and fauna of the region, showing her a pamphlet on local history. Hebe, her notebook near her face, was taking down notes with a pencil; her attention was fixed although her gaze seemed scattered, she was so curious and wanted to see everything. Once the tour was over, she thanked the guide warmly. When she left the house, her only comment was: “Did you hear how she referred to the indigenous people? She said they were completely tame Indians.”
            She found the guide’s statement wrong, racist, of course. But she also found it interesting. And she didn’t judge. She knew that the most important thing, always, was to try to understand.
            In the final years of her life, the oeuvre of Hebe Uhart received a very particular kind of recognition. Her story collections and novellas moved from independent presses to corporate publishing houses such as Alfaguara. When it came to her nonfiction, she chose to stay loyal to smaller publishers and, if she had an unedited piece, she preferred to send it to some press run by young people. There was a waiting list to get into her writing workshop and her stories were adapted into theater performances. She seemed to be unfazed by it all and went on having barbecues on her terrace. Ricardo Enrique Fogwill, one of the finest and most renowned (and unruly) Argentine writers, once said: “Hebe is the best writer in Argentina” and everyone agreed wholeheartedly (and whoever didn’t yielded to the charismatic Fogwill). I told her this in her porteño apartment in Almagro, while she served us limoncello, a gift from a student in her narrative workshop. She opened the window to her balcony, which was filled with gorgeous plants, azaleas, bougainvilleas, and said:
“Bah.”
Followed by:
“If you write, and your writing’s good, soon enough you’ll be recognized. Look, how could I be the best writer in Argentina—what does that mean? Nothing.”
Writer and teacher Pía Bouzas, a former student of Hebe’s and one of her closest friends, has a theory about the renaissance of her work, which came after years of being overlooked: “Beyond her effort and perseverance, I believe that readers came to her. Younger writers began to observe the world as she did, to consider the details, the off-kilter, to go off the beaten track of the born-and-bred writer. She found a path outside this masculine Argentine tradition, which isn’t only referring to male writers, but also to a way of using language. This is aligned with her search for younger writers. She deals with important themes—immigration, family, the Argentine—but she does so with a lighter touch…CA

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