Saer’s final novel, La Grande, is the grand culmination of his life’s work, bringing together themes and characters explored throughout his career, yet presenting them in a way that is beautifully unique, and a wonderful entry-point to his literary world.Moving between past and present, La Grande centers around two related stories: that of Gutiérrez, his sudden departure from Argentina 30 years before, and his equally mysterious return; and that of “precisionism,” a literary movement founded by a rather dangerous fraud. Dozens of characters populate these storylines, incluind Nula, the wine salesman, ladies’ man, and part-time philosopher, Lucía, the woman he’s lusted after for years, and Tomatis, a journalist whoM Saer fans have encountered many times before.Written in Saer’s trademark style, this lyrically gorgeous book — which touches on politics, artistic beliefs, illicit love affairs, and everything else that makes up life — ends with one of the greatest lines in all of literature: “With the rain came the fall, and with the fall, the time of the wine.”

Juan José Saer’s Scars explores a crime committed by a laborer who shot his wife in the face; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime. Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in time when the lives of these characters are altered, more or less, by a singular event.

This entire novel consists of a discussion between two friends — one who just returned from Europe, the other a young accountant — about a grand birthday party neither one was able to attend. This doesn't stop them from swapping stories and hypotheses, which balloon into a riveting depiction of the complexities of life, especially at the dawn of Argentina's Dirty War.