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Mario Benedetti. La borra del cafe. Barcelona. Destino. 1993. 217 pages.
In seemingly effortless and transparent prose, Mario Benedetti foregrounds how the Kunstlerroman (a novel which involves individual struggle to become an artist) explores the limits of representation. In doing so, he creates a narrative which suggests that the novel's traditional connections to the projects of constructing a personal world, an intensely private space in which to question or reinforce the culture's dominant beliefs and values, are overshadowed by the writer's own struggles with the intractabilities of language, and how, as Wittgenstein put it in Lectures and Conversations (1938), "There is a constant surprise at the new tricks language plays on us when we get into a new field."
La borra del cafe opens in Montevideo, where in a somewhat nostalgic voice the narrator, Claudio, immediately defines the unstable space that formed his conception of his world:...