She Found Bounties in Small Towns, Local Talk and Everyday Life

A QUESTION OF BELONGING, by Hebe Uhart. Translated by Anna Vilner.

Rebecca West, in an elegy for D.H. Lawrence, recalled that when he arrived in a new city, he would race from the rail station to his hotel room and “immediately sit down and hammer out articles about the place, vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people.”

The Argentinian writer Hebe Uhart (1936-2018) was the anti-Lawrence. Time goes more slowly in unfamiliar places, and her travel writing expresses that measured and elongated quality. She had sensitivity and restraint and a wonderful sense of the absurd. She did not reach for Lawrencian pronunciamentos, and she would not be hurried.

Uhart is well known in Argentina, where during her lifetime she published two novels, several books of short stories and works of nonfiction. These volumes are only beginning to be issued in English, by the indefatigable nonprofit publisher Archipelago Books.

Her work has appeared recently in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Many of Uhart’s fans, like many of Joan Didion’s, prize her crónicas — her essays, articles and travel writing — more than her fiction.

A selection of these crónicas is available now in English under the title “A Question of Belonging.” They’ve been translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, who lends them a sophisticated informality.

Uhart was not wealthy. She traveled on the cheap, mostly in South America, by bus or rail. She liked to window shop. She tended to avoid large cities, preferring small towns.