The Victim Saved

Abstract

Juan José Saer is one of the most influential writers of recent decades. His figure as an intellectual has become increasingly important and this article choose his narrative as a model for fiction which refused to follow the ways and techniques of the “Boom”, the repetition of clichéd views of nature, for example, and avoided the use of local colour and privileged or fantastic views of American reality. There is, however, in his narrative, as he himself said, the desire to attain some transcendental knowledge of the surrounding world. Saer is an extra-territorial writer, that is, someone who adopts a marginal and abnormal view, as is the case of all great intellectuals. He is compared with the great novelists of the nineteenth century, but also to the unusual Juan L. Ortiz. This eccentricity leads to the idea that the most important literature never conforms, always searches for limits so as better to redefine them.