Stephanie Jane reviewed Dream Come True by Katherine Silver
A comprehensive retrospective
4 stars
A Dream Come True is the title of a single, hauntingly memorable story within this lengthy collection, as well as being the title for this English language collection itself. The book spans an amazing seven decades of Juan Carlos Onetti's short stories and includes fifty of his works ranging from half-page flash fictions to short novellas. Many are set within a single imagined town of Santa Maria so we get to revisit characters in different situations which I found particularly interesting. Santa Maria has a high proportion of Swiss, German and Italian immigrants so I could recognise the European roots of their communities at the same time as witnessing the shifting space maintained between them and the indigenous people.
I loved Onetti's writing style, here expertly translated by Katherine Silver. He had an intuitive understanding of human needs and interactions which I feel gives a deeper meaning to the stories. …
A Dream Come True is the title of a single, hauntingly memorable story within this lengthy collection, as well as being the title for this English language collection itself. The book spans an amazing seven decades of Juan Carlos Onetti's short stories and includes fifty of his works ranging from half-page flash fictions to short novellas. Many are set within a single imagined town of Santa Maria so we get to revisit characters in different situations which I found particularly interesting. Santa Maria has a high proportion of Swiss, German and Italian immigrants so I could recognise the European roots of their communities at the same time as witnessing the shifting space maintained between them and the indigenous people.
I loved Onetti's writing style, here expertly translated by Katherine Silver. He had an intuitive understanding of human needs and interactions which I feel gives a deeper meaning to the stories. Everyday notions such as enjoying a sip of mate or lighting a cigarette are loaded with a sense of significance beyond their normalcy, although sometimes this seemed carried to such a point that I lost track of the story itself! For me, Onetti's most powerful work was from the earlier decades and I especially liked the unreal vibes of stories such as A Dream Come True where an unknown woman convinces a theatre director to create a scene of her own devising. Other favourites include Esbjerg By The Sea where Kirsten's husband tries to put together enough money for his homesick wife to visit her native Denmark, and On The Thirty-First which is a wonderfully unusual New Year's Eve tale.
I probably should have treated A Dream Come True as a bedside tome to dip into rather than working my way through all the stories without any other reading distractions. This method did mean I was able to appreciate the two treatments of the same story, originally published some twenty years apart, but I also found the collection hard going at times. None of Onetti's stories are easy reads - even the shortest have a thoughtful quality to them and a complexity which I found often left me questioning if things I had taken at face value were actually what Onetti had meant! These stories are beautifully layered and detailed, benefiting from pondering as well as simple reading. My thanks to Archipelago Press for this Onetti retrospective.
