Reviewed by Arianna Aron<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay\u2019s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit his mood, and wrote a play divided into sections instead of acts. In his country, he was an outspoken supporter of the Frente Amplio<\/em>, resisting the brutal dictatorship that forced him into a 12-year exile. He was a man who took sides, and took chances. That such a man could invent the intimate diary of a person like Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9 says much for Benedetti\u2019s deep sensitivity to the human condition. The diary is the text for his 1960 novel La Tregua<\/em> (The Truce<\/em>).<\/p>\nMart\u00edn Santom\u00e9 is a 49-year-old worn out accountant close to retirement, a widower living with his three grown children. A casual bed fellow once described him as looking like a clerk even when he\u2019s making love. He is so unimaginative that, of all the occupations in the world, what he would choose if he\u2019d be something other than an accountant, is to be a waiter. As he looks back on the 20 years since his wife\u2019s death, he realizes that he hasn\u2019t been happy, but he did right by his children. He was spared \u201cthe unyielding look that is reserved for heartless fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n
A man of his times, Santom\u00e9 is upset by his younger son\u2019s homosexuality. He blames himself for Jaime\u2019s \u201cdeviance,\u201d and can\u2019t understand why Blanca and Esteban turned out \u201cnormal.\u201d But Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9 continues to be the dutiful father, and we appreciate him for that, just as we forgive him for defining women by their body parts and believing that when they\u2019re menstruating they can\u2019t concentrate. Unlike certain contemporary homophobes and misogynists, he has no rancor toward gays and women, and is in fact a person who both tolerates and accepts differences so well that he welcomes a female colleague at work when she is one of three new employees assigned to his department. As with the male workers, he calls her by her family name, which happens to be the surname of the author who wrote a phony Part Two of Don Quixote<\/em> (a book that made Cervantes very angry because in the counterfeit edition, Don Quixote falls out of love with Dulcinea). Benedetti, the consummate writer, must have seen something compelling there, because soon after Avellaneda comes to work for Santom\u00e9, he falls in love with her\u2014with a love that is transformative and enduring.<\/p>\nMart\u00edn Santom\u00e9 had never imagined this romance. For a long time he\u2019d been satisfied with anonymous one-night stands that had nothing in common with the sense of communion he\u2019d felt with Isabel, his deceased wife. With her, he tells his diary, \u201cevery one of my impulses mathematically found its own receptive echo. We were made for each other.\u201d The love for Avellaneda, a woman half his age, was a surprise that happened to him, not something he\u2019d gone looking for.<\/p>\n
When the accountant first contemplates what it could be like with Avellaneda, what troubles him most is the mismatch between what he sees as her youthful expectations and his future of guaranteed arthritis\u2014the portent of a relationship with barely a temporary patent. In ten years, when he\u2019s pushing 60 and she is 33: will she cheat on him? Leave him for a younger man? As the affair progresses, though, Avellaneda declares her love, explaining to Mart\u00edn that it\u2019s not for his face, or his years, or his words, or his intentions that she loves him, but because he is a good man. His preoccupation now becomes her future happiness. He broods over whether there will be enough strength and longevity to give her a good life, a concern that becomes sadly ironic as the story unfolds.<\/p>\n
Harry Morales, the translator of this intriguing novel, does a fine job of giving Santom\u00e9 a voice in English. Whether the accountant is speaking of the tedium and frustrations of office work, or the aging lover is fretting over physical and existential issues inherent in May-December romances, or the rejuvenated man is reflecting on his feelings for this \u201ctruce\u201d that is occurring in his otherwise dreary life, the diarist\u2019s entries\u2014always a bit reserved\u2014draw us in and make us a part of his world.<\/p>\n
Though Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9\u2019s world is confined to the small middle-class society of Montevideo in mid-twentieth-century Uruguay, his issues with family, career, aging, retirement, and above all, love and loss, resonate beyond borders and time to make his diary a touching and rewarding universal read. Of the ninety books Benedetti published, The Truce<\/em> stands out for its popularity, with more than a million copies sold, translation into twenty languages, and a 1974 film version by Sergio Ren\u00e1n that was nominated for an Academy Award. In Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9\u2019s simple urban life there is a depth and authenticity that people everywhere can identify with and appreciate, and now, with Harry Morales\u2019s refreshing new translation, readers of English can enjoy this engaging novel by one of Latin America\u2019s most acclaimed writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Truce\u00a0by Mario Benedetti translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales 192 pgs. | pb | 9780141396859 | \u00a38.99\u00a0 Penguin Modern Classics Reviewed by Arianna Aron Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay\u2019s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit his mood, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":404662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[66696,34576,34566,66716,6516,66706],"class_list":["post-307356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-arianne-aron","tag-harry-morales","tag-mario-benedetti","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-spanish-literature","tag-the-truce"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307356"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404672,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307356\/revisions\/404672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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