Juan José Saer was born on June 28, 1937, and died on June 11, 2005. He was an important Argentine writer. In 1987, he won the Premio Nadal because of his novel The Event (La ocasión). In 1990, he shared the Silver Condor Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Las veredas de Saturno. In 2004, he received a Platinum Konex Award for his work from 1994 to 1998.
Biography
Juan José Saer was born in Serodino, a small town in the Santa Fe Province of Argentina, to Syrian parents who originally came from Damascus, Syria. He studied law and philosophy at the National University of the Littoral and later taught History of Cinematography there. In 1968, he received a scholarship to move to Paris, where he taught at the University of Rennes.
Saer died in Paris on June 11, 2005, at the age of sixty-seven, after suffering from lung cancer. He was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. At the time of his death, he was working on the final chapters of his longest novel, La Grande, which was published after his death. Along with it, a collection of his literary articles titled Trabajos was also released.
In 2012, the first part of Saer’s previously unpublished working notebooks was published in Argentina by Seix Barral under the title Papeles de trabajo. A second volume followed, created after five years of editing by a team led by Julio Premat, who also wrote the introduction for the first volume. These notebooks provide readers with a detailed look at Saer’s creative process. Critics note that Saer’s books can be seen as a single body of work, centered around a fictional region called "La Zona," located near the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. This region is home to characters who appear and develop across his novels.
Many of Saer’s novels explore the experiences of a writer who leaves their home country, often through the story of two twin brothers. One brother stays in Argentina during a time of political control, while the other, like Saer himself, moves to Paris. His stories follow the separate and connected lives of these brothers and other characters who appear in different roles across his works. Like other writers of his time, such as Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, and Roberto Bolaño, Saer’s writing often uses specific types of stories, such as detective fiction (The Investigation), stories about colonial history (The Witness), travel narratives (El río sin orillas), or works inspired by famous writers like Proust (The One Before) and Joyce ("Sombras sobre vidrio esmerilado").
Style and influences
Along with Juan Carlos Onetti, Saer is a Rioplatense writer (from the Rio de la Plata region) who shows the greatest influence of American writer William Faulkner in his work. This is especially clear because Saer often repeats a group of characters (Carlos Tomatis, Pichón Garay, Ángel Leto, Washington Noriega, and the Matemático, among others) in a specific place: the city of Santa Fe.
Legacy and reputation
Four of his novels—The Investigation (La Pesquisa), The Witness (El Entenado), La grande [es], and The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (Glosa [es])—are listed on different lists created by writers and critics from Latin America and Spain to highlight important books in the Spanish language from recent years.
Martin Kohan considers Saer to be the most important writer in Argentina after Jorge Luis Borges. Beatriz Sarlo considers him to be the best Argentine writer of the second half of the 20th century.