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HASTA SIEMPRE OSVALDO
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deaths are like a jab to the midriff: they knock the wind out of you.
The Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano, who has died of lung cancer aged 54,knew such jabs. He loved boxing but his writing is full of people who take one body blow after another and still cling to what one of his tangos called "that absurd wound,life". Tango and boxing came together in Soriano's 1981 novel Winter Quarters , set deep in the winter of Argentina's military dictatorship. The boxer Morales knows he is on a hiding to nothing against the army champion. The thing is not to throw in the towel, to keep one's dignity, to fail but keep one's self-respect. Soriano was no failure. He spent much of his childhood in Patagonia, then moved to Buenos Aires, determined to be a famous footballer or to write about it. He failed at the former career -cigarettes were already slowing him up- but his writing talents were much in demand. After the Argentine armed forces seized power in 1976, he went into exile in Belgium, by which time he had published his first novel, Sad, Lonely And Final. The characters were from his other great love, the cinema. For Soriano, the cinema was not only an escape, but a school for learning dialogue, how to pace a story, and slapstick. While in exile, Soriano wrote his best-known novel, A Funny Dirty Little War, which uses slapstick techniques to convey the reality of the early 1970s in Argentina. It was while in Belgium that Soriano met his wife, Catherine, with whom he had one son. After the fall of the military government in the mid-1980s, he brought Catherine back to Argentina and took up his old nocturnal life,sleeping all day, getting up at about 5 pm, and talking, writing and smoking until dawn. His journalism helped Argentines recover a sense of decency and pride while his novels continued to be huge successes. He wrote a spoof spy thriller on the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, A Lion Laid At His Feet, full of humour and compassion. A few months ago, he published what was to be his last novel, Pirates, Ghost And Dinosaurs. It seemed odd, violent and disjointed; with hindsight, it can be seen as a wounded boxer's rage at the impending technical knockout. |