José Donoso

Written as a draft in 1973, set aside, and forgotten, The Lizard’s Tale was discovered among Donoso’s papers at Princeton University by his daughter after his death. Edited for publication by critic and poet Julio Ortega, it was published posthumously in Spanish under the title Lagartija sin cola in 2007. 

Defeated and hiding in his Barcelona apartment, painter Antonio Muñoz-Roa—Donoso’s alter ego—relates the story of his flight with Luisa, his cousin, lover, and benefactor, after his scandalous desertion from the “Informalist” movement (a witty reference to a contemporary Spanish art movement and possibly an allusion to the Boom as well), in which he had been a member of a certain standing. Frustrated, old, and alone, the artist looks back on his years in the small town of Dors, a place he unsuccessfully tried to rescue from the crushing advance of modernity, and on the decline of his own family, also threatened by the changing times. 

La novela transcurre en un pueblito chileno donde todo gira en torno a una mina de carbón. La obra cuenta la historia de distintos personajes marcados por la tragedia. Como la Elba y su hijo Toñito, quienes viven en una casita en las afueras, asediados por las mujeres de los mineros, cuya superstición los acusa de provocar un pavoroso accidente. O El Mocho, un tipo solitario que cuida una especie de palacio construido por los dueños de la mina. Y está La Bambina, dueña de una whiskería, ex artista de circo y vinculada sentimentalmente a El Mocho. 

Gustavo Zuleta, profesor de Literatura chileno, acepta una oferta para trabajar en una pequeña universidad de Estados Unidos. Mientras espera a su esposa, que llegará dos meses más tarde con su hijo recién nacido, Zuleta descubre los contrastes de la vida académica. De la mano de Ruby, una joven encantadoramente gorda y misteriosa, el protagonista es testigo de envidias y resentimientos, ambiciones de poder, relaciones sexuales e incluso de un asesinato múltiple. Donde van a morir los elefantes es una implacable metáfora de las conflictivas relaciones que los intelectuales latinoamericanos mantienen con la cultura norteamericana.

These striking novellas are the witty crystallizations of José Donoso's concerns over a lifetime of writing.

In them he poses many of the questions raised by his fellow Latin American writers, Fuentes, García Marquez, and Vargas Llosa: What is truth? How does one use history in fiction? How does an artist create? Taratuta is a mystery story in which a writer tries to track a slippery Russian revolutionary in history and in life. Still Life with Pipe shows the comeuppance of an ambitious man when he meets true art and can't escape its grasp.

Curfew takes place during one twenty-four hour period in January 1985. Matilde Neruda, widow of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, has just passed away, and various factions are rallying to turn the event to their advantage: for Pinochet's junta, it represents a chance to assert political authority, while for the intellectuals who had basked in the Nerudas' light, it is an opportunity to grab the spoils of the estate. Against this backdrop of complex, often conflicting motivations, Donoso weaves a portrait of a society struggling to fashion a daily existence for itself, and of an intelligentsia vainly attempting to salvage the remnants of glory days long gone by. But Curfew is also a story of the tragic love between Judit Torre, an upper-middle-class radical who wants to escape her bitter past; and Mañungo Vera, a native son returning after a successful career as a European pop singer. In the zone between documentary-like realism and grotesque absurdity, José Donoso evokes the suffocating atmosphere of a country under dictatorship, and its quietly devastating effect on the actions of those who live there

A Chilean writer named Julio and his wife Gloria are beset by worries, constantly bickering about money, their writing, and their son (who may or may not be plying the oldest trade in Marrakesh). When Julio's boyhood best friend, now a famous artist, lends the couple his luxurious Madrid apartment for the summer, it is an escape for both — in particular for Julio, who fantasizes about the garden next door and the erotic life of the lovely young aristocrat who inhabits it. But Julio's life and career unravel in Madrid: he is rebuffed by a famous literary agent, who detests him and his novel; his son's friend from Marrakesh moves in and causes havoc; and Gloria begins to drink. In the face of pitiless adversity, Julio's talent inexorably begins to fade. With The Garden Next Door, Jose Donoso has rendered a carefully crafted and bitterly comic meditation on gardens, deceit, and the nature of a writer's muse.

El volumen contiene cuatro novelas cortas: Sueños de mala muerte; Los habitantes de una ruina inconclusa, El tiempo perdido y Jolie Madame. Los cuatro relatos fluctúan entre lo festivo y lo grotesco hasta lo más desazonador y lúgubre. El autor tanto recurre al humor negro más desaforado y esperpéntico como se adentra en el relato puramente fantástico, conjura los fantasmas de una juventud fascinada por lo cosmopolita o disecciona con saña el fondo atávico y ritual de cierta burguesía acomodada. 

Fatality, seduction, mystery. Three keys to eroticism. Beautiful, naive, perverse beyond herself, and suddenly liberated by a providential widowhood, the young Marquesita de Loria wanders like an aphrodisiac ghost of flesh and bone through the most aristocratic streets of 1920s Madrid. Always with one foot in the other side of the moon, the marquesita submits to a learning experience more sensual than sentimental, acknowledging in herself the malevolent power of seduction, that enchantment which brushes against dissolution or death. Animated by the semi-fantastical eroticism characteristic of José Donoso's pen, 'The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquesita de Loria' exposes the disturbing, unmanageable vibration of our most secret sensibility: eros as an instrument of pursuit, as powerful as it is futile, of an identity that fades away in the gaze of others.

La acción arranca un día de verano en que la familia Ventura, instalada en su casa de campo, organiza una excursión en busca de un lugar paradisíaco que, supuestamente, existe muy cerca de las grandes montañas. Los Ventura adultos y los sirvientes quieren imponer la idea de que la excursión solo dura un día, pero en realidad se acaban ausentando un año, tiempo suficiente para que la casa de campo deje de ser lo que fue.

Los personajes de los tres relatos son profesionales liberales: médicos, arquitectos, dentistas, modelos, gente acomodada que se reúne en fiestas, hace vida de café y restaurante, y pasa los fines de semana fuera de la ciudad. Pese a todo, la obra transmite la marca atormentada, esperpéntica, que caracteriza a Donoso.

This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a masterpiece" by Luis Bunuel and "one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time" by Carlos Fuentes. The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader's mind. (Verba Mundi)

"It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole."—Nicola Barker

"El obsceno pájaro de la noche is a dense and energetic book, full of terrible risk-taking, populated with legendary saints and witches, mad old crones and a whole estate-full of freaks and monsters, and narrated by a disturbed deaf-mute'' —Robert Coover, The New York Times Book Review

"The story is like a great puzzle . . . invested with a vibrant, almost tangible reality.” —The New York Times

"Although many of the other “boom” writers may have received more attention—especially Fuentes and Vargas Llosa—Donoso and his masterpiece may be the most lasting, visionary, strangest of the books from this time period. Seriously, it’s a novel about the last member of an aristocratic family, a monstrous mutant, who is surrounded by other freaks so as to not feel out of place."
—Publishers Weekly

Esta es una novela sobre la soledad. La soledad es la que echa a la sirvienta Violeta en brazos del joven Álvaro cada vez que sus padres se marchan los domingos. Y son la soledad y la incomunicación las que mueven los sutiles hilos de las relaciones matrimoniales y extramatrimoniales de Álvaro y Chepa. Con un dominio extraordinario del lenguaje, el novelista chileno expresa los engaños con que los protagonistas intentan huir de su pavorosa soledad, en medio de una sociedad que reprime y destruye los sentimientos y deseos espontáneos.

With its stark atmosphere, powerful characterizations, and dazzling alterations of perspective in time and gender, José Donoso's early masterwork, Hell Has No Limits, anticipates the qualities of better-known works of this Chilean magic-realist.

Originally published in 1966, this grimly vivid novel evokes the sweetness and despair during one fateful day in the collective existence of Estación El Olivo, a decayed community marked for doom as surely as Donoso's central character, the transvestite dancer/prostitute la Manuela, whose virginal daughter operates the brothel out of which she/he works. La Manuela is menaced both by his would-be protector, the local politician/land baron who wants to raze Estación El Olivo for his expanding vineyards, and by a coldly vengeful trucker, nursing a lifetime of hurts, deprivation, and suppressed sexual ambiguity. The lives of this trio—past and present—are indelibly forged in the novel's stunning climax, which combines a shocking act of violence in the present with a bizarre erotic encounter from decades before.

"El lugar sin límites continues to hold up a mirror in which it is painful to look at oneself, but the discomfort that José Donoso's work generates even today is a manifestation of its timeliness, of the inexhaustible force of his literature." Patricio Pron

Andrés Ábalos, solitario y cincuentón, es el desconcertado testigo de los últimos días de una abuela nonagenaria que se debate entre la niebla y los relámpagos de la demencia. Esperpéntica a la vez que realista, esta obra prefigura los temas que marcarán la obra de Donoso: decadencia, identidad, transgresión y locura.

Selección de narraciones breves. Varias ya se habían publicado en volúmenes precedentes, pero otras permanecían inéditas hasta esta edición.

El volumen reúne seis relatos breves: El hombrecito; Ana María; El charlestón; La puerta cerrada; Paseo; y Santelices.

Donoso's first volume of stories appeared in 1955 and included Veraneo (Summer Time), Tocayos (Namesakes),  El Güero (The Güero) ; Una señora (A Lady); Fiesta en grande (A Grand Party); Dos cartas (Two Letters) and Dinamarquero (The Dane's Place).

Reúne la escasa producción poética del chileno. Muchos de esos poemas -“refugio ante las monstruosidades de la prosa”, según el autor- fueron escritos durante los años que vivió en Calaceite, un pueblito de la comarca turolense del Matarraña, donde la familia Donoso encontró refugio y espacio creativo entre 1972 y 1976. El núcleo se convirtió en un foco cultural de gran nivel, gracias al paso por allí de Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Luis Buñuel, Rosa Regás, Jaime Gil de Biedma o Carlos Barral.

Central Diaries. A Season in Hell is a fascinating journey into the intimate and creative life of José Donoso, one of the most relevant storytellers in Hispanic-American literature. In these pages, covering the period from 1966 to 1980, it is possible to access the laboratory where fundamental titles of his work are forged: Hell Has No Limits, A House in the Country, The Garden Next Door, and, particularly, The Obscene Bird of Night, a book that led him to the brink of madness and physically sickened him, while also establishing him as an unavoidable figure in the literary landscape. If in Early Diaries, covering the years 1950 to 1965 and published in 2016, the reader could witness his creative effervescence and the constant search for a style, a voice, a literary identity, in this second volume we see him in full command of his resources. We see an author of absolute radicalism when it comes to experimenting with writing – with the form of what we call a novel – and populating his fiction with desperate, decadent, and grotesque characters, beings that inhabit a world where boundaries become blurred, whether they define genre, genealogy, or class.

Donoso's dedication to literature is total – here are his readings, his essay projects, or his devastating judgments towards his peers – and crystallizes in a moment that is unlikely to be repeated: that of the Latin American boom, with its million-dollar advances and its apoteosic launches, translations, prizes, and, of course, the pettiness and envies on the agenda. The tensions of his profession run parallel to a permanent and stark self-observation, which involves his private and family life: these are the years when – along with María Pilar, his wife – he settles abroad, adopts his daughter Pilar, and begins to navigate as best he can the stormy married life.

An obsessive kaleidoscope about the ghosts of creation.

We’ve grown so accustomed to casual show business confessions that we’ve come to believe that diaries are a place for recording one’s darkest secrets. However, in the case of a full-blooded writer like José Donoso, his notebooks naturally contain an abundance of work troubles, creative dilemmas, trial writings, corrections, and crossed-out text.

Since his youth, Donoso was a tireless diarist, and roughly eighty notebooks in his own handwriting are preserved today. These are divided into two collections, one at the University of Iowa and the other at Princeton. In her book, Correr el tupido velo (Drawing a Thick Veil), his daughter, Pilar Donoso, covers the diaries from the second period. This volume, edited by Cecilia García-Huidobro, focuses on the diaries from the first period (1950-1965), which record the Chilean writer’s early creative babblings and tireless self-exploration in search of a literary identity. In Diarios tempranos. Donoso in progress, we witness the miraculous intimate life of an author who is bubbling over with enthusiasm, who never gives up, who tries again and again and spurs himself on with a sentence that paints a full-body self-portrait: “I’m dying to write".

'El resurgir de José Donoso': Cecilia García-Huidobro presenta los 'Diarios Tempranos de José Donoso: A veinte años de su muerte' en Casa América. 6/06/2017

'Donoso, Barcelona y el boom', por Jorge Herralde, Qué Pasa, 14/07/17

'Una selfie desgarrada', por Cecilia García-Huidobro, Culturas-La Vanguardia, 03/06/16

A partir de viejas fotografías de finales del siglo XIX, de rumores oídos en los patios y pasillos de su niñez, y de sus propias e infatigables obsesiones, José Donoso reconstruye la historia de su familia desde que el primer Donoso puso pie en el Reyno de Chile hace cuatrocientos años. Terratenientes altivos e ignorantes, políticos brillantes o advenedizos, intelectuales, médicos chalados y beatas pueblan unas páginas donde la pluma del escritor tiñe la historia con la tinta de su imaginación.

An intimate and critical chronicle of one of the most outstanding generations in the literature of the American continent. In Personal History of the Boom, you'll encounter the most prominent figures of those years (Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, among others). These are fellow travellers who appear in their most personal moments - literary gatherings, camaraderie over meals, various celebrations - providing us with an endearing and engaging narrative, not without controversies and gossip.

This publication includes the texts that the author added for the second edition of this book, Ten Years Later, and The Domestic 'Boom' of María Pilar Donoso, as well as other writings that rescue unpublished and lost pieces from the author's archives or those published in the press and previously untraceable. From there, Donoso once again engages with the margins of that era, including foundational authors like Manuel Puig or Juan Carlos Onetti, in addition to the experience of exile and "desexilio" (the return from exile).

As Cecilia García-Huidobro Mc. notes in her enlightening preface: “It could not be otherwise, as Personal History of the Boom avoids definitions to outline the literary experience as a life experience. This makes it sensitive to the fluctuations of taste, enabling the construction and reconstruction of genealogies based on new voices and reinterpretations. This edition aims to face this challenge head-on.”

“Young Donoso, at the age of 26, reveals two of his most deeply rooted passions that will shape him as a writer and essayist: his interest in and appreciation for women's writing—Ivy Compton-Burnett, Isak Dinesen, and Virginia Woolf are recurring themes in his articles—as well as a true obsession with deciphering the mysteries of creation. In Jane Austen y la elegancia del pensamiento (Jane Austen and the Elegance of Thought), the essay submitted to Princeton University as his thesis, both enthusiasms converge to delve into the female characters who take center stage in these novels, like a child who disassembles a toy because he wants to know how it operates, what mechanisms make a seemingly simple yet timeless writing work.” From the prologue by Cecilia García Huidobro

“After reading Donoso, it is almost impossible not to immerse oneself again in Austen's novels.” El Periódico

José Donoso es coautor, junto con Pilar Donoso, de esta traducción.

El volumen reúne artículos y entrevistas escritos a principios de la década de 1960, cuando Donoso era aún joven, y su mirada hacia el entorno y sobre todo, hacia la literatura, era fresca, punzante, directa, incisiva, e incluso abiertamente polémica y agresiva. A lo largo de la obra, Donoso pasea por Europa y Chile, por los libros, la música, la pintura, la escultura, las personas y los personajes, siempre con un tono satírico.

Reúne en un solo volumen una selección de la obra periodística del escritor desde 1960, año en que empezó a publicar en la revista Ercilla. Una década después escribió crónicas para la Agencia EFE, actividad que le abrió las puertas de diversos medios periodísticos en Argentina, Colombia, México, Brasil, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Venezuela... Cecilia García Huidobro organiza temáticamente los artículos.