No Man's Land

Onetti's Buenos Aires in No Man's Land is less a setting than an exhaustion, a city its characters, mostly writers, gallery owners, and idle bohemians drifting between affairs, treat as thoroughly used up, and the novel's fragmented structure, jumping between a dozen loosely connected figures rather than following a single throughline, mimics that exhaustion formally: no one storyline earns enough sustained attention to feel like the center, because Onetti's real subject is a milieu that has stopped believing anything deserves sustained attention.

Faruru, a Polynesian island the old philosopher Num describes to the drifting protagonist Aránzuru, an unmapped territory where nothing done can harm anyone or interest anyone else, functions as the novel's clearest fantasy of escape and its clearest admission that escape is fictional. Num can't produce the island on any map, and Onetti never lets Aránzuru or the reader treat Faruru as anything but a story someone is telling to make the unbearable city bearable a little longer, a paradise built entirely out of the need for one to exist.

Aránzuru's affair with Nené, which ends in an abortion he registers mostly through his own detachment rather than any grief on her behalf, exemplifies how thoroughly Onetti's characters have stopped being able to feel their own lives directly. Love, pregnancy, loss all arrive filtered through a numbness the novel treats as the era's real diagnosis, not individual coldness but a whole generation's response to a world war and a home city that both feel equally unreal.

Published in 1941, No Man's Land is Onetti's first novel and the first appearance of the fractured, disillusioned voice he would spend the next four decades refining. Before Santa María, his invented town, gave his fiction a fixed geography, this early Buenos Aires is where he worked out the tone, corrosive, unsentimental, allergic to any character's self-justification, that would define everything from The Shipyard to A Brief Life. Read alongside those later, more disciplined novels, No Man's Land shows Onetti still discovering how much narrative cohesion he was willing to sacrifice for atmosphere, and the answer, even here, is almost all of it.