Book Description
“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, 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. Vitamins are “brown and circular, like grainy meatballs,” a racist blonde woman “must have been a fourth-tier secretary in her home country, but in La Paz she bossed people around with the vigor of a resurrected louse.”
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, 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. 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.
Snapshot portraits of everyday life from an Argentinian maestra of keen observation . . . 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
These are not moralizing pieces, yet Uhart exemplifies consistent values—most evidently an openness to the other and a suspicion of prejudice and sentimentality. She accommodates a diversity of meetings through an array of observations, speculations, interpretations, and empathetic intuitions, organically informed by texts that range from learned to quirky.— Michael Collins, Asymptote
Uhart is often noted for her unique way of looking, characterized by restless curiosity as well as an almost childlike sense of awe . . . [She] plays up her failures rather than hiding them—or hiding from them. Understanding and change are not always within her grasp, and knowing when this is true is one of Uhart’s greatest strengths.— Colm McKenna, The Millions
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
To experience the world through the words of the esteemed Argentinian writer Hebe Urhart is to be offered a uniquely calm and compassionate view of ordinary places and people that effortlessly makes them seem anything but ordinary.— Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts
Powerful and devastating . . . Every word makes a massive impact in this slim, arresting poem.— Emily Tarr, The Southern Bookseller 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
Superb . . . Language fascinated Uhart. She avidly collected local expressions and phrases, particularly Creole ones. Her 'tender and playful' voice conjures the essence of people and places in elegantly spare descriptive detail.— Anne Foley, Booklist
This sparkling collection of short stories and travelogues by Argentinian writer Uhart brims with sharp observations and self-deprecating humor . . . Uhart shines in her nuanced portrayal of all-too-human moments.— Publishers Weekly
Uhart's voice is unpretentious, straightforward, and playful; while she takes the world, and all that she sees in it, seriously, she does not take herself too seriously . . . Even without knowing her in life, we who read these crónicas are fortunate enough to meet Hebe Uhart on the page, to travel with her, and to see humanity through her eyes.— Cecilia Weddell, World Literature Today
