Pablo Urbanyi

by Pablo Urbanyi of Argentina
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And, in French reviews, Pablo Urbanyi has been compared to Julian Barnes and Tom Sharpe.
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La Prensa has characterized Silver as a "...vitriolic parody... a somber and anguished commentary...on modern society...its morals...its pseudo-scientific ambitions," and concluded that Urbanyi is "...an eminent Argentinian writer."

Silver is the story of a young albino gorilla who is bought in a market in Gabon by an American anthropologist and his British wife. This gorilla is then taken back to California to be raised in the "enriched" environment of their home and used as a research subject. But Silver is a gorilla in appearance only, having a human mind and leading a human lifestyle, inspiring in others both love and appreciation for his exoticism, and xenophobic hatred.

Wit, humour, surrealism, exaggeration, anguish, social commentary...this is the world of Pablo Urbanyi.

Pablo Urbanyi Mosaic Press - Cataloguing by Author

Mosaic Press Administration
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Author's Name: Pablo Urbanyi

Biography: Pablo Urbanyi is both a prolific and acclaimed Argentinian/Canadian writer. He is the author of numerous books published in Spanish, French, English, and Hungarian. Among his works have been En ninguna parte, 1981, De todo un poco de nada mucho, 1988, Nacer de Nuevo, 1992, Silver, 1994, en la Corte de Eutopia, 1999, Una epopeya de nuestros tiempos, 2004.

Pablo Urbanyi: An Argentine-Canadian Writer
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Throughout his literary production, which has included portraits of drawing-room revolutionaries, bumbling detectives, obsessive academics, unscrupulous physicians, pathological philanthropists, fascistic entertainers, and other characters, Urbanyi has retained a remarkably consistent satirical style and ability to touch on basic societal and existential problems in a comical way.
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Excerpts from Pablo Urbanyi's work
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Pablo was born in Hungary in 1939 and lived there throughout World War II, during which time his father fought in the Hungarian resistance movement.
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In the mid-1960's Urbanyi and his family moved to the mountain resort town of Bariloche, in the Argentine Andes, where Pablo worked as a wool merchant and travel agent before opening up a small nightclub. They later returned to Buenos Aires, where he continued with odd jobs of various sorts and gave up writing altogether, all the while devoting himself to reading voluminously in world literature. The "Boom" in Latin American literature was on, and Pablo read the works of Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as the darkly humorous Polish-Argentine writer Witold Gombrowicz.
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Urbanyi, like many Argentines, was also interested in science fiction, particularly in the novels of Olaf Stapleton, Philip Dick, and Ray Bradbury.
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Following his early successes as a writer, Urbanyi was hired as an editor for the cultural supplement of La Opinión, at the time the leading centre-left newspaper in Buenos Aires.
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Urbanyi, however, did not wait for Timerman's disappearance: in 1977 he and his family left for Canada, the only country in which his wife, a pharmacologist, could find work, and settled in Ottawa.

Emigration to Canada was a shock to Urbanyi: now nearing forty, increasingly successful as a journalist, and already popular as a writer, he found himself parachuting down into a country that was virtually unknown to him and to which, if not for the political chaos in Argentina, he had never dreamed of immigrating. Given the vast cultural and linguistic differences between Buenos Aires and Ottawa, he decided to forgo his journalism career and make a living teaching Spanish; within a year he was on the part-time faculty at the University of Ottawa. He also plunged ahead with his writing, undeterred by the isolation of working alone in Spanish in Canada; as time has gone by, in fact, his relative detachment from his surroundings has in some ways left him freer to focus more intensively on his literary vocation.

Many of the short stories of his collections De todo un poco, de nada mucho and Nacer de nuevo are set in Canada, as are two of his novels: En ninguna parte, published in 1981 and later translated into both English and French, and Una epopeya de nuestros tiempos, which was published in 2004. Urbanyi brings the same acerbic wit and unyielding satirical eye to his adopted country that he uses in work set in his native Argentina. En ninguna parte is a brilliantly humorous send-up of Canadian academic life, while Una epopea and many of his short stories contrast the antiseptic, consumer-obsessed world of Canada with the more human, individually oriented reality of Latin America. Canada is also present is several other works of Urbanyi, often as a place of exile, retreat, or refuge after turbulent events in other parts of the world.

Urbanyi continues to devote himself almost exclusively to his writing. He has abandoned his teaching at the University of Ottawa in favour of less time-consuming and demanding teaching in language schools, and returns to Argentina on a regular basis. Curiously, with the exception of the late Spanish author Antonio Risco, whom he met at Laval University before he abandoned a master's degree there, Urbanyi does not feel a great affinity with other Latino-Canadian writers, though he does participate occasionally in the public readings organized by Jorge Etcheverry and Luciano Díaz in Ottawa. Nor has Urbanyi had much contact with English Canadian or Quebec writers; indeed, he continues to read almost exclusively in Spanish, though his interests span world literature. He has published, however, in literary reviews in both English Canada and in Quebec, including Canadian Fiction Magazine, Possibilitis, and Ruptures, has done all he can to further the translation and diffusion of his works both in English and French, and has received grants from the Canada Council and the ministries of Multiculturalism and External Affairs. His work is known and respected by both English- and French-language publishers in Canada, where his mordant wit and assured, professional style have made him one of the most published and widely appreciated Hispanic-Canadian writers. Three of his novels have appeared in English and four into French, making him the most frequently translated Latino-Canadian author in the country. Yet Urbanyi continues to be an author in exile, writing and publishing in another language, enjoying a continuing success in his native land, but still not a familiar figure to the reading public in his adoptive country.
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Principal Works of Pablo Urbanyi

2058, en la corte de Eutopía. Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 1999.
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Excerpts from Pablo Urbanyi's work

Canadian-Argentine-Hungarian writer Pablo Urbanyi's Silver has just been published in English by Mosaic Press.