Juan José Saer

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Juan José Saer (28 June 1937 - 11 June 2005) was one of the most important Argentine novelists of the last fifty years.

Born to Syrian immigrants in Serodino, a small town in the Santa Fe Province, he studied law and philosophy at the National University of the Littoral, where he taught History of Cinematography. Thanks to a scholarship, he moved to Paris in 1968, where he remained until his death from lung cancer in Paris at the age of 67. He had recently retired from his position as a lecturer at the University of Rennes, and had almost finished his final novel, "La Grande" (2005), which has since been published posthumously, along with a series of critical articles on Latin American and European writers, "Trabajos" (2006).

Saer's novels frequently thematize the situation of the self-exiled writer through the figures of two twin brothers, one of whom remained in Argentina during the dictatorship, while the other, like Saer himself, moved to Paris; several of his novels trace their separate and intertwining fates, along with those of a host of other characters who alternate between foreground and background from work to work. Like several of his contemporaries (Ricardo Piglia, Cesar Aira, Roberto Bolaño), Saer often takes as his point of departure a particular and highly codified genre, e.g. detective fiction ("The Investigation"), colonial encounters ("The Witness"), travelogues ("El rio sin orillas"), or a canonical modern writer, e.g. Proust (in "La mayor") and Joyce ("Sombras sobre vidrio esmerilado").

His novel La ocasión won the Nadal Prize in 1987.