A Question of Belonging: Crónicas

by Hebe Uhart, Anna Vilner (Translator)

"An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans . . . [that] exudes the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement." – Kirkus Reviews, starred review

25 Crónicas – uniquely Latin American short stories – from a master of the form, a star heralded alongside Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez for blending insight, honesty, and humor

Uhart reinvigorates our desire to connect with other people, to love the world, to laugh in the face of bad intentions, and to look again, more from lapwings, road-side pedicures, and the overheard conversations of nurses and their patients, to Goethe and the work of the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés.

“It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes,” Hebe Uhart writes in the opening story of A Question of Belonging, a collection of texts that traverse Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and beyond. Discoveries sprout and flower throughout Uhart’s oeuvre, but nowhere more so than in her crónicas, Uhart’s preferred method of storytelling by the end of her life. For Uhart, the crónica meant going outside, meeting others. It also allowed the mingling of precise, factual reportage and the slanted, symbolic narrative power of literature.

Here, Uhart opens the door on all kinds of people. We meet an eccentric priest who conducts experiments down by the riverside hoping to land on a cure for cancer; a queenly ( beautiful and relentlessly indolent) teenage girl; a cacique of the Pueblo Nación Charrúa clan, who tells her of indigenous customs and histories.

She writes with characteristic slyness. In the last lines of the title story, Uhart writes, “And I left, whistling softly.” Wherever she may have gone, we are left with the wish we could follow alongside.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 28, 2024

About the author

Hebe Uhart was an Argentine author born in 1936. She majored in Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and worked both as a teacher and a professor. She also taught in literary workshops.

Uhart published six short novels, among which we find "Camilo asciende" and "Mudanzas", and a number of short stories, collected in the books "Dios, San Pedro y las almas" (1962), "Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?" (1963), "La gente de la casa rosa" (1970), "El budín esponjoso" (1977), "La luz de un nuevo día" (1983), "Leonor" (1986), "Guiando la hiedra" (1997), "Del cielo a casa" (2003), "Camilo asciende y otros relatos" (2004), "Turistas" (2008) and "Un día cualquiera" (2013). During her last years she wrote the travelling chronicles "Viajera crónica" (2011), "Visto y oído" (2012), "De la Patagonia a México" (2015), "De aquí para allá" (2017) and "Animales" (2018).

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of cronicas, short essays primarily concerned with travel to various cities and communities in Latin America, draws from five decades of Hebe Uhart’s literary career, closing with a piece written near the end of her life chronicling her stay in a hospital. Observant and obviously fascinated by people and cultures, her reports are told with an honest tone and a wry humour. A wonderful read.

A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2024/05/29/wi...

[Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, delightful collection of chronicles (crónicas) following that travels and curious conversations of Hebe Uhart.

I got this book through a subscription with the publisher, Archipelago Books, and I dove in with an open mind (considering I didn’t choose it). I was unsure what to expect from a lesser known Argentinian writer and stories that I knew nothing about. Yet, I left this book with two valuable takeaways I’d like to share.

The first takeaway centers around living life with an attitude of curiosity and exploration. Hebe Uhart is a wonderful raconteur and appears to be the epitome of an observant person. She makes you feel like a fly on the wall as she enters obscure places, shanty towns, and remote villages. She occasionally dips herself into the commentary with her own opinions or reflections, but mostly these chronicles are filled with candid conversations with locals, visual descriptions, and nuanced observations. I like to think of myself as a curious person who’s keen to the intricacies of culture/people/history, but this collection provided a great example of how I can better exemplify that attitude.

Secondly, I found this collection to expose my ignorance when it comes to South America and Latin culture/history. In the United States, we learn very little beyond brief geography and wars that relate to our borders. These collections did not do any deep dive and I’ll likely forget the towns/people mentioned, but they did highlight how different historical events, colonization, and wars over the years shaped the population within each region. This seems quite obvious and I wasn’t assuming otherwise, but more so it never crossed my mind as an American whose education is primarily filled with American and European history. Overall, Uhart spiked my interest in reading more Latin works and digging into the history.

This wasn’t a must read or revolutionary work. I’m not entirely confident that every reader will deem it worthwhile as no one story was overly thrilling. But the subliminal lessons and nuggets of cultural information I got from it made reading the book a rewarding experience.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection of Crónicas by Argentine author Hebe Uhart, translated by Anna Vilner. I’d never heard the term “Crónicas” before - a mixture of travelogue, essay, and autobiographical short story. Very curious about this world, informative, and open-hearted.

[Aalia Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminded me of the quote from Lady Bird about how love and attention are the same thing

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This bundle of stories from Hebe Uhart were delightful and such an adventure. The author details her travels in a frank yet quaint manner. Reading these stories felt like catching up with a familiar friend! I did enjoy the causal yet informal tone Uhart carries throughout this collection, however I wish we would have heard a bit more personal reflection or musings on life from her time spent traveling, meeting new people/tribes, and just overall her outlook on life as the title suggested we would. Overall, I enjoyed my time inside these short scenes from Uhart's journeys.
Thank you NetGalley for the advanced readers copy of this book.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of Hebe Uhart until I read a review of this in the NYTBR a few weeks ago; it is a rare exception to my almost invariable dislike of books that Dwight Garner likes.

The essays include incidents of Uhart's everyday life in Buenos Aires, travels to various small towns in Argentina and Paraguay, and excursions to Mexico (the Guadalajara Book Fair), Peru, and Colombia. She is an acute observer of small details, often overlooked:

"their houses contain many old books, which were passed on to them by their grandfathers; they don't throw or give them away - it would be like throwing or giving away their grandfather. Nor do they use a feather duster to clean, it would be like feather dusting Grandfather."

"I could have gone on reading in that little room, but it was strange to read Barthes in a place where pigs were running around as they pleased."
(although would that really be stranger than reading Barthes anywhere else?)

"In the central plaza, the only sharply defined details on the monument for General Osorio are the general and his horse; below them a shapeless mass of hazy soldiers, dead, alive, injured. It reminds me of Spinoza: some live, while others die; some rise, while others go to sleep - every variety of existence does nothing more than reflect the unity of nature."

This is a quiet book, not a lot of action, but a lot of observations worth remembering.

"This is what happens to us; we learn things and then forget them after a while."

"We all have asses, Hebe, she replied soberly.
It was a Socratic truth, the moment when Socrates grasps for universal consensus before continuing his argument.
Indeed, Socrates, we all have asses."
(I wish I could have quoted this years ago when I was taking a graduate course on Plato!)

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am super envious of her rich inner monologue, I wish I can see the world through such colorful and charming expositions.

I love short stories, I love travelogues, I love anthropologic and ethnographic observations in travelogues, and this book is all of them combined with her witty humor.

(Read on the bus down to El Calafate in southern Argentina)

[Rita Egan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories, many of which were originally published in The Paris Review. Hebe Uhart regales us with tales from her travels throughout her homeland of Argentina, and being into Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay etc. Her style is chatty, straightforward and observational, but lacks emotional interrogation giving the impression of a dismissive grump sometimes, but the further I read, the more I came to like her. The first third and the final story are my favourite, but each one taught me something about South American life and culture that I didn't know.

This is a slim collection but I didn't fly through it. 1 or 2 at a time was enough.

Thanks to #archipelagobooks for the ARC

[David Budnick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had such a difficult time finishing the book. As much as I wanted to love it, I found the passages to be void of any meaning. It seemed like a writing piece, just for the sake of completing a novel before her death. I'm glad to have been given the perspective of various experiences throughout Latin America, but most of the interactions were surface level, and -like another author had mentioned within the novel- minimalistic.

[Rafael López]

enjoyed a ton! I’d like to read her crónicas in the original Spanish to see how it compares. Really loved her casual, artful observations and her traveler’s spirit. Plenty of clever turns juxtapositions. I think her power as a writer stems from what she withheld from the page, or edited out. Awesome stuff.

[Fitch Perkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last one was my favorite

[Sandra DeJong · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely series of narrative miniatures about her travels to various non-urban parts of Latin America. Somehow she she ages through it, but that caught me by surprise! Wish I knew more about Latina culture…..

[Evan Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some delightful stories

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on the foreword, I thought I’d love it: short travelogues chronicling the beauty in life’s banality. And while there were some lovely moments, Uhart’s writing didn’t resonate with me. Partially this is because of her overly complex writing style which can make the stories hard to follow. And part of it is because she’s often unsuccessful at getting her observations to rise above boring banalities.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely small book of the Argentinian author Hebe Uhart’s uniquely haphazard, incisive observations. She has decisive preferences and longings that seem to guide her travels and the subjects of her shifting curiosities. With a sharp eye and a clever sense of humor, she shares her peculiar findings and interviews with the wide spectrum of people and places that capture her attention. She seems a bit more like a painter than a writer with words.

[Penelope Trowbridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of stories about every day life in South America. Not much happens in these stories. The author/narrator visits places in South America, meets people in each place, and makes quirky observations.

[Cristina B · Rating 3 out of 5]

i wish I had a copy in Spanish I probably would’ve liked it more

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short travel chronicles by an Argentine writer around South America. Observational, well written and interesting. Many are concerned with indigenous communities. This was an enjoyable read.

[Boris Gregoric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Descriptors:

Cronicas; Latin America; Social Reportage;
Humor; Matter-of-factly Style; No-judgement Reportage; Indigenous Themes;

Author: Hebe Uhart (1936 - 2018).
Book:Original edition, 2018
Translation: Anna Vilner, 2024

Pp: 217

Overall: Five stars. Great little library find!

[鹿𝐃𝐑 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

I so enjoyed reading the short stories by Hebe Uhart! Hebe’s ways of narrating these short stories is such of bluntness, character and humor.
I could feel Hebe retelling the stories with such “Bah” and enthusiasm!

My favorites were: “I didn’t know”, “Off To Mexico”, “Good Manners”.

Most of these short stories are cozy readings and you can pick up your pace and read it as you please. In my case, I read it in one go as I’m a little bit “chismosa” sometimes so that made me want to still reading and get more into it, ha!

[didi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just when I was about to ask why North American women were such feminists, she said: “Onto something interesting: are women writers different from men?” Sometimes I think that they are, because they dress differently, spit differently, and hardly any women are plumbers or cockroach exterminators-pest control workers are always men. They also swallow pills in a different way, women grab the little morsel with their fingers, while I’ve seen men gulp the pill from their open palm. There are special cases of course, exceptions. I didn’t explain all of this due to idiomatic differences. She added: “Are women better at writing about their inner lives?” “I’d have to see.” Honest and diligent, she said: “I’ll have to read more to find out.” After that, she left. The northern swallow, following her radar. She went to the flower shop-she knew that it was near my apartment without checking outside, without having looked left or right, or having seen any sign. And she was on her way.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cultural masterclass on the South American World. Stories of discovery and revelation distilled through an abundance of eccentricity. Absolutely lovely.