Biography & True Stories
March 2020
Crónicas completas (Full Chronicles)
by Hebe Uhart
In Hebe Uhart’s chronicles, more than landscapes and history, the author captures speech. These journeys, mostly intimate, are a search for ways of speaking. Hebe Uhart’s work as a collector of linguistic expressions is a fortunate and important contribution, since the woman who pays attention to language is not a collector of curiosities, she is a writer. Her fascination for language is not limited to spoken language; as she tours cities and towns, she notes down stores’ names, advertisements and graffiti, a routine repeated in almost every story. She is also interested in all the oral expressions that are intimately related to literature, such as proverbs. Hebe Uhart is voracious, but she offers all this information with great kindness, careful not to overwhelm readers, sharing with them facts which, however obvious, may have never caught their attention. The political stance behind these chronicles is quite clear: Latin American anchorage, stories that have been ignored or frowned upon —local history, everyday knowledge, linguistic expressions— and, one of her favorite subjects, Indigenous peoples on the continent.
