VAST HELL

Abstract

Guillermo Martínez was born in Bahía Blanca, in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1962, four years before General Onganía came into power. In 1982 he was awarded the first prize in the National Short Story Competition ‘Roberto Arlt’ for his book La jungla sin bestias (The Beastless Jungle); six years later he received the first prize from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes for his second collection of short stories, Infierno Grande (Vast Hell). His first novel, Acerca de Rodorer (Concerning Rodorer) was published in 1992. Martínez belongs to the generation of writers who grew up in the midst of the Argentina of the ‘dirty war’ between the military dictatorship and the guerrilla, a war that left the country shattered and from which Argentina has not recovered in spite of the present government's attempts to erase all memory of those past atrocities. The war did violence to everyone and everything, including the Argentine language. The writers of Martínez's generation were forced to reconstruct a tongue destroyed by the abuse of power, by irrational violence, by forced stupidity which infected words like a virus infects the blood. Their task was not only to bear witness and to build imaginary landscapes for their chronicles which are not, it must be said, mere documentaries. First they had to rescue the words themselves from debasement, using a pared-down, clear-cut language, free from the rhetoric, far-fetched metaphor and bombast so dear to the military heart.