“He was an incredibly funny, warm, and gregarious kind of guy. Alonso, who in addition to his wife, Viola, and son, Marc, leaves his daughter, Melissa of New York City, and a brother, Ramon of Cambridge. “Everybody who knew him commented on how funny he was - some called it dry wit. “He was very humorous in person, and also in his writing,” she said.
She recalled with admiration his persistence in writing and revising books even in the face of declining health, and when his later work didn’t attract as much attention as his early novels. In 1980, he married Viola Thomas, who recently retired as a French professor at Tufts. Alonso’s second marriage, to Jessica Weinstein Bethoney, who formerly taught at Bunker Hill Community College, also ended in divorce. They had two children before their marriage ended in divorce. His first marriage was to Jean Anderson, an activist and social worker. Alonso graduated from Arlington High School, received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1957, and a doctorate from Brown University. Alonso said in the 2015 interview with his friend, the writer Lyle Rexer. “This impelled me to do my best to make American English my home,” Mr. Amado ended up teaching at Harvard, but he never learned English well enough to fit in socially, a crushing turn of events for someone so gregarious. In Argentina, Amado Alonso was an opponent of dictator Juan Peron, and for their safety, the Alonso family moved to the United States. “During the Franco era, my father was an ‘unperson’ in Spain,” Mr. Alonso called his father a “double exile,” who left Spain after angering dictator Francisco Franco. “And she was as British as could be until the end of her life.” Alonso’s son, Marc, an editor who lives in Old Lyme, Conn. After Amado died, she taught Spanish and sought financial assistance from a friend to ensure that their sons could attend college. Alonso’s mother, Joan Evans de Alonso, was a British citizen who married Amado, moved with him from Spain to Argentina, and then to Greater Boston. His father was Amado Alonso, a writer, linguist, and critic who ran afoul of authoritarian regimes in Spain and Argentina before teaching at Harvard University at the end of his life. Alonso was born on March 13, 1936, in Buenos Aires. Alonso exercised, McDonald wrote, is “never seen outside the thick walls of great art.”Īnd novelist Russell Banks called the novel “a little jewel of a book, with more facets cut into its 62 pages than can be found in most novels five times as long.” Alonso’s “professional preciseness and pacing.” The control Mr. Globe reviewer Gregory McDonald praised Mr. In a New York Times review, Eliot Fremont-Smith called the book “intense” and said “it glitters like a jewel, and its light comes from within.” Is this where the killings took place? I suspect not, since your modestly brief description of the events indicated to me that they were done very heatedly and quickly, without the drawn-out formalities of a firing squad.” “At the bottom of the garden the wall is chipped,” Perry wrote to Rene. The correspondence between the two touched on what happened in those violent moments. It turns out that Rene had taken part in a 1936 uprising in a Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War, and helped gun down fascist soldiers.Ī chipped wall, scarred by the bullets, was all that remained of the incident years later when Perry visited the town on a family vacation. He said he wrote three unpublished novels before “The Chipped Wall” was accepted for publication and established his reputation as a writer in 1966, when he was 30.Īt about 24,000 words, the brief novel is an exchange of letters between two middle-aged professors, Rene and Perry. Within a few years of beginning that career, he attracted widespread praise for his writing. Upon returning to Greater Boston, he said in 1971, “I got my job at Tufts and discovered I enjoy teaching.” Alonso had spent a year in Madrid after finishing graduate school and serving in the Air Force Reserve.
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