Utopia undone
Subtitle: the fall of Uruguay in the novels of Carlos Martínez Moreno
By: Kenton V. Stone.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Lewisburg [Pa.]; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 217
Subjects: Martínez Moreno, Carlos, 1917-  -- Criticism and interpretation.; Uruguay -- In literature.
Description: With this ground-breaking book, Kenton V. Stone presents to North American readers one of the most intriguing writers to emerge out of Latin America in recent years, Uruguay's Carlos Martinez Moreno.

Martinez Moreno started writing in the 1960s and achieved international reknown in 1981 when he was awarded Mexico's international fiction prize (by a panel including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, and Ariel Dorfman) for his novel El color que el infierno me escondiera - a novel which, as the title suggests, takes the classic work of Dante Allighieri as its model. Stone's study of Martinez Moreno's novels has a dual purpose. The first purpose is to show that Martinez Moreno is a writer of the "Boom" in the Latin-American novel of the 1960s who deserves a revival in critical attention.

The second purpose is to propose that new readings of his work extend beyond political protest to a study of Dantesque moral analysis - especially evident in El Infierno.

Once a utopian welfare state known to all as the "Switzerland of the Americas" for its democracy, pacifism, and prosperity, Uruguay succumbed to military rule in 1973. Martinez Moreno - along with compatriots Mario Benedetti, Eduardo Galeano, and Juan Carlos Onetti (among others) - had long predicted the demise of Uruguay's utopia in his novels.

From 1973 until his death in exile, he took up the role of resisting - as novelist and attorney - what became the most ruthless regime of the "dirty wars" of Latin America in the 1970s, a regime that forced one-fifth of its citizens into prison or exile.

In Utopia Undone, Stone offers the reader an incisive analysis of Martinez Moreno's award-winning book and the novels that led up to its writing. He analyzes Martinez Moreno's works as they range from the Cuban revolution in El paredon (1963) to Bolivia's cocaine trade and Che Guevara in Coca (1968). Stone painstakingly points out the parallels between Martinez Moreno's craft and the deterioration of Uruguayan society, a process chronicled in his novels as la deca, "the decay." The reader is introduced to the Uruguayan author's life and times and how they were inevitably set on a collision course with what Roa Bastos calls Martinez Moreno's "revolutionary dream." Finally, Stone examines the end of Martinez Moreno's career - in exile in Mexico, bearing witness to Uruguay's largely overlooked diaspora with El Infierno, a monumental classic of the "literature of the disappeared" with a Dantesque devotion to truth and moral vision.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-207) and index.