Biography

Juan José Saer (Serodino, Santa Fe, Argentina, June 28, 1937 – Paris, France, June 11, 2005) was an Argentine writer, considered one of the most important in Latin American literature and in Spanish-language literature of the 20th century. He is considered the most important writer of Argentina after Jorge Luis Borges (according to Martin Kohan) and the best Argentine writer of the second half of the 20th century (according to Beatriz Sarlo). Four of his novels - La Pesquisa, El Entenado, La Grande and Glosa - appear on various lists made by Latin American and Spanish writers and critics of the best 100 books in the Spanish language of the last 25 years For his novel La Ocasión he won the Nadal Prize in 1987. In 1990, he won the Silver Condor Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Las Veredas de Saturno. Born to Syrian immigrants in Serodino, a small town in the Santa Fe Province, Saer studied law and philosophy at the National University of the Litoral, where he taught History of Cinematography. Thanks to a scholarship, he moved to Paris in 1968 where he taught at the University of Rennes. He had recently retired from his position as a lecturer at the University of Rennes, and had almost finished his final novel, La Grande (2005), which has since been published posthumously, along with a series of critical articles on Latin American and European writers, Trabajos (2006).

In the year 2012, a first installment of his previously unpublished working notebooks were edited and published as "Papeles de trabajo" by Seix Barral in Argentina. A second volume soon followed, which was the result of five years of editing work by a team coordinated by Julio Premat, who wrote the introduction of the first volume. These notebooks allow readers a privileged insight into the creative processes of Saer. As critics point out, the books of Juan José Saer may be taken as a single "oeuvre", set in his "La Zona", a fluvial region around the Argentinian city of Santa Fé, populated by characters who are developed and become referential from novel to novel.

Saer's novels frequently thematize the situation of the self-exiled writer through the figures of two twin brothers, one of whom remained in Argentina during the dictatorship, while the other, like Saer himself, moved to Paris; several of his novels trace their separate and intertwining fates, along with those of a host of other characters who alternate between foreground and background from work to work. Like several of his contemporaries (Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Roberto Bolaño), Saer's work often builds on particular and highly codified genres, such as detective fiction (The Investigation), colonial encounters (The Witness), travelogues (El río sin orillas), or canonical modern writers (e.g. Proust, in La mayor and Joyce, in "Sombras sobre vidrio esmerilado").