Uruguayan literature is committed like few others. From Benedetti up to his own butazzoni via Galeano u Onetti we find authors engaged in a narrative encounter between the novelistic, the essayistic and even the poetic that connects with that notion of the terroir as the support of all stories from the historical to the existential.
This is how a bibliography like Butazzoni's is understood to immerse us in scenarios full of historical significance from that humanistic focus that focuses on characters that move not only the corresponding plot but also the historical development of different spaces in a Latin America that has been particularly visible since the 20th century. to particular ideological, political and social abysses.
Only that in that manifest will for the autochthonous it ends up forming perfect microcosms of a much more extensive scenery. Nothing better than locating characters in known spaces to reveal an even anthropological vision that only halfway between reality and fiction, between novel and reflection, transcends to a greater extent than the mere facts recorded with the shaft not always firm of the historical. The writers and their task to rewrite the story from the detail to the complete understanding of the events.
Top 3 recommended novels by Fernando Butazzoni
The ashes of the Condor
On many occasions, the black genre is widely surpassed by the stubborn reality. A reality stubborn in demonstrating that the most ominous assumptions of any plot cannot overcome what is most certainly human does not precisely carry epic goodness surpassed in our environment.
Butazzoni offers us the inverse path from reality to fiction. Because sometimes salvation can only be assuming that everything is a fiction. In the subjective component of a plot made alive or a life made plot there is much of the necessary atonement for literary sins.
The novel tells the life story of Aurora Sánchez, a young Uruguayan woman who in 1974 crossed the Andes mountains, five months pregnant, to flee from the army of Pinochet. His personal adventure is a pretext to tour the different stations of repression in countries like Chile, Argentina y Uruguay during the years in which the Condor Plan. The title of the work alludes metaphorically to the consequences that the Condor Plan has had for the new generations of Latin Americans, consequences that still exist in fully democratic societies.
The ones who will never forget
The flight of criminals after Nazism found a hiding place in South America. International laws and treaties sought unexpected and unwanted protection for identities that hid all kinds of Hitler's henchmen. In the absence of official justice, the eye for an eye followed that natural course of those who seek revenge at any price...
In 1965, a group of Israeli commandos clandestinely infiltrated Uruguay with the mission of executing Herberts Cukurs, a former Nazi war criminal. They did it so brutally that the world shivered. Who were the killers? What were the names of his local accomplices? Why do many consider the victim a hero and not a ruthless criminal?
Fernando Butazzoni writes without hesitation. There are the names and surnames of those commandos, their stories, their lives and their deaths. The identity of his collaborators in Montevideo is also revealed, and the terrible doubt that is still controversial in many countries today is answered: is it possible that the Mossad commandos have killed the wrong man?
an american story
During an unfortunate afternoon in August 1970, everything in Uruguay seems about to explode. World leaders remain expectant. History is written on the edge of the abyss. The Tupamaro guerrillas are preparing to execute Dan Mitrione, who is being held hostage in a "people's prison" in Montevideo. They accuse him of being a CIA spy. Meanwhile, an American agent named Randall Lassiter peers into the shadows of the city to find out if his fate will be that of the hunter or the prey. President Pacheco, harassed and unloved, is torn between moral dilemmas and political strategies. Democracy crumbles.
The gray hours of the afternoon advance towards their tragic outcome. Eduardo González, who is a good family man and a master in the art of simulation and secrecy, tries at the last moment a desperate maneuver to change the course of events. No one knows yet, but he is about to start a decade of lead throughout Latin America.
Fernando Butazzoni proposes to review the events that moved the world during that terrible winter, and for this he builds a vertiginous novel from start to finish. An American history, with a refined and concise prose, invites the reader to a narrative journey that will leave him breathless. An essential book, with classic status.
