Born in 1936 in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Hebe Uhart is one of
Argentina's most celebrated modern writers. She published two
novels, Camilo asciende (1987) and Mudanzas (1995), but is better
known for her short stories, where she explores the lives of
ordinary characters in small Argentine towns. Her Collected Stories
won the Buenos Aires Book Fair Prize (2010), and she received
Argentina's National Endowment of the Arts Prize (2015) for her
overall oeuvre, as well as the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American
Narrative Prize (2017).
Maureen Shaughnessy's translations from Spanish include works by
Hebe Uhart, Nora Lange, Margarita Garcia Robayo, and Luis Nuno. She
has also translated Guadalupe Urbina's Maya folktales, as well as
several Canari legends. Shaughnessy's translations have been
published by Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, The
Brooklyn Rail, and Asymptote. She lives in Bariloche, Argentina.
Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize
"These stories rarely adhere to conventional plots, but as mood
pieces they're effective glimpses into the peculiarities of Uhart's
characters, who crave order but usually concede that the world's
default mode is disarray...A welcome (if, alas, posthumous)
introduction to a sui generis writer." — Kirkus Reviews
"There’s a wonderfully off-kilter humanity to Uhart’s writing that
readers are sure to respond to. This collection feels like a
deserved celebration of a writer’s career." — Publishers Weekly
"A remarkable introduction to one of the unsung women writers of
Argentine letters." — Library Journal
"Immersing oneself in this collection – her first book to be
translated into English, by Maureen Shaughnessy – is indeed like
travelling, as we visit one character’s world and then another’s,
inhabiting the revealing mundanities of each life. Little happens
in terms of plot; rather, each story is an understated exercise in
conjuring a whole existence through a revealing thought or gesture
. . . the reader returns from her travels feeling refreshingly
unbalanced." – Emily Rhodes, The Guardian
"The Scent of Buenos Aires is concerned with the social and
communal, but with a wink and a nudge toward the ridiculous habits
of people. Uhart suspects, loves, and laughs at each of her
characters in equal measure because she knows that, when it comes
to the array of human emotion and motivation, “one person’s freedom
ends where another’s begins.”" — Foreword Reviews
"It is clear to me why Uhart is so loved by many Argentine readers
. . . Reading her fiction highlights the ways in which much of the
discourse about Argentina and Argentine literature . . . steps over
Argentines and the place itself in an effort to get somewhere else.
Uhart’s quiet insistence upon seeing and hearing the people around
her affirms a place and people real and worthwhile in and of
themselves." — The Common
“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. The Scent of Buenos Aires is translated from the
Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, and Animals, translated by Robert
Croll, is out in April next year.” -- Rivka Galchen, author
of Atmospheric Disturbances, in Restless Books
"In the first half of the book, we find stories revolving around
the female body and expounding on domestic themes while in the
latter half of the book, we encounter tales on politics, activism,
and the role of Indian women in these areas...Ambai infuses a deep
sense of reality in her stories by making the worlds of these women
rich in sensory details - one can almost smell and taste and feel
the environment of the characters." — Cleveland Review of
Books
"The first collection of Argentinian author Hebe Uhart’s work to be
published in English features stories of daily life and strange
situations with wit and humor aplenty." — Billy
Coghill, Omaha Public Library
"The stories... are acutely observed, but as if by a foreigner
or a newcomer with no previous experience of what is being
described; they’re told with a deceptive simplicity that draws the
reader into deep labyrinths of everyday life." —Esther Allen,
Words Without Borders
"(Uhart's stories) steadily, unobtrusively oxygenate the world
around them ... Uhart helped shape a generation of writers in
Argentina as both a teacher and a writer, her influence both
diffuse and impossible to ignore ... Shaughnessy has, in turn,
helped us hear English as Uhart might have heard it, displaying a
remarkable prowess ... It is because we can now hold these
stories in our hands that her insights serve as a second set of
eyes, her perspective shaping ours as we look at the world around
us." — Music & Literature
"Cultivating a sense of respect for (and kinship with) other levels
of sentience, Uhart’s manner of acknowledging the
interconnectedness of consciousness allows us to see Buenos
Aires—any place, really—as its own organism, composed of endless
living, breathing parts. Further, Uhart takes us into the internal
worlds of these beings, shining light on both the typical and
extraordinary ways we perceive our environment and ourselves."
— Asymptote
"One of Argentina's finest and most beloved authors, Uhart has
managed to escape the attention of a wider global readership for
some time ... Uhart's stories are concise and filled with both dry
and conversational wit and flashes of poignant insight. Uhart is a
slice-of-life writer, and the breadth of those slices is almost as
impressive as their deceptive depth." — Thrillist
"Uhart is concerned not with creating a mythology but with
examining humanity, at all ages, in many social classes, jobs and
towns. Short stories in translation offer insight into language:
its meaning and pronunciation. [The Scent of Buenos
Aires] explores means of communication as they amplify female
voices and perspectives." — The London Magazine
"These witty and sometimes cryptic tales are mostly set in Buenos
Aires by a writer’s writer who has an acute eye for the uncanny and
the mundane...(Uhart) is one of the most singular and exiting
female voices of recent decades in Latin America. Her unique body
of work and her unforgettable voice lives on in many of today’s
younger generation of writers emerging on the continent." — Morning
Star
"Hebe approached her subjects from an astonished and oblique angle
that, at first, might appear naive. Not so. Her short stories
feature protagonists rarely seen in Argentine literature [...]
Always rescuing the voices that no one pays attention to, yet not
at all in a pompous way, for, if there was one thing that Hebe
Uhart never wanted to do, it was to fall into the common position
of giving voice to the voiceless and other slogans that she would
consider idiotic." — from "Perfect Pitch" by Mariana Enriquez,
author of Things We Lost in the Fire, in Página/12
"I do not like authors who are too satisfied. The best tradition of
Argentinean literature was built in these vacillations: the
uncertain narrator of Borges or of Hebe Uhart, that idea that
meaning is always being constructed, and that opposes other
traditions in which the narrator is sure of the order of things." -
Ricardo Piglia
"Hebe Uhart is the best contemporary Argentinean storyteller." -
Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill
"[In Uhart's writing] from simplicity one penetrates depths and
labyrinths where you can only advance if you participate in the
magic of that new world...It neither clarifies nor completes a
known reality. It reveals, or rather, it is a unique, distinct
reality." - Haroldo Conti
"Hebe is the best and the strangest. After decades of writing and
publishing narrations, Hebe became an author that dominated a
central genre for the Argentine tradition: the short story.
However, this has the geographic particularity of being
transnational: when we think about stories in Argentina we think
about literature created in the Río de la Plata, between Argentina
and Uruguay. And that was one of the strongest nuclei in Hebe's
literary identity, by which it was not a national but an inherently
Río de la Plata literature." - Inés Acevedo
"Hebe's texts (her fiction as well as her chronicles) played with
the world in a manner that didn't fully coincide with Victor
Shklovski's definition of defamiliarization, that disposition of
finding the strange and the unfamiliar within the quotidian. This
is perhaps because the quotidian perception of Hebe Uhart in the
world was, in itself, lacking automatization from the beginning,
being always full of amazement, of a cultivated sense of
bewilderment. That register was then translated to her texts
through a writing that was ingeniously natural, with a simplicity
that was only simulated." - Martin Kohan
"The world of Hebe Uhart, which so intensely appears in her
stories, is abundant, collective and absolutely personal ... She as
given Argentine Literature countless unforgettable, exciting
characters that establish, when talking or acting, when having
certain feelings over others, a way of existing, of resisting, of
withstanding." - Elvio E. Gandolfo
"I normally tear through books at a blistering pace but not this
one. I spent a week lingering over each of the 25 short stories
in The Scent of Buenos Aires...I can see why Hebe Uhart is a
beloved Argentine author. She knew women. Uhart had a gift for
writing stories about the inner life of crazy, eccentric, and
curious women." — Meilee Anderson, She Explores
Life (blog)
"Offbeat, colloquial and witty . . . [The Scent of Buenos Aires]
creates magic from the mundanities of life in Argentina . . . There
is something of Stevie Smith in her style, a knack for turning
sophomoric ore — fairy tales, puns, encounters with animals — into
literary gold . . . the economy of her writing both disguises and
concentrates its psychic wallop." — Valerie L.
Popp, Wasafiri
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