“Over a career spanning 50 years, [Juan Carlos] Onetti depicted Uruguay in short stories and novels as a place marked by pettiness, idiocy and squalor — a Gogolian province in the tropics [sic] — and populated by characters who are by and large unhinged. However unflattering, his portrait of his country was one in which Uruguayans recognized something of themselves.” – The New York Times Book Review