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Chilean writer José Donoso is one of a handful of authors inevitably mentioned in relationship to the 'boom' in Spanish American literature during the 1960s and 1970s. His name is frequently linked with those of other Latin writers such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Rulfo, and Cortázar. Like his contemporaries, Donoso blends the physical and the psychological in his fiction. The perceptions of his characters are constantly changing. For Donoso, 'reality' is a state of mind always subject to the imagination, and nothing is stable.
The work of José Donoso, the renowned Chilean writer of fiction, is surveyed in this volume, which concentrates on his novelistic prodiction up to 1981. Philip Swanson analyses each novel in detail and plots the twin development of narrative technique and existential outlook. He sets this development within its natural context of the "boom" - the remarkable period of innovation initiated in the 1960s by South-American authors such as Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. Swanson also analyzes the progressive breakdown in conventional structural patterns, which stemmed from Donoso's own disintegration of faith in order and existential certainties. The climax of this process was his most successful novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970). Donoso subsequently moderated such formal complexity in a transition towards resignation and acceptance. But this apparent counter-reaction, as Swanson argues, is not merely a regression to simpler forms, but disruptively subverts realism from within, and points a new way forward after the exhaustion of the experimental explosion of the 1960s and 1970s.
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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 -- Back cover
This anthology of critical essays seeks to fill a void which exists in the psycho-social study of Jose Donoso's works. It includes articles such as: Literature as an Exploration of Self; El obsceno p jaro de la noche and the role of the Narrator Agent; and El jarden de al lado: Rewriting the Boom.
By the author of ""The Obscene Bird of the Night"", ""Sacred Families"" and ""A House in the Country"", this is a story of the tragic love between an upper-middle-class radical woman and her lover who has returned after a career as a European pop star.
"This volume examines the multiple narrative perspectives Donoso presents and traces a transformation in Donoso's works from complex stage performance to political forum. Studying fiction as grotesque, mannered theater or as a transparent screen through which social and political concerns are scrutinized, Gonzalez Mandri illuminates another constant in Donoso's work: a weaving of feminine and masculine aspects of artistic voice as they incorporate the idioms of drama, radio, film, and television."--BOOK JACKET.
A critique of the Chilean novelist's A House in the country, studying particularly its representation of the many-faceted concept of `authority'. Casa de campo combines the techniques of traditional novels with the 20th-century intermingling of reality and fiction. The novel's central theme of authority as figured in the discourse, its play between reality and illusion, and its dialogue with literature and society as a whole form the subject of this study. Murphy explores the illusory authority of the narrator in controlling characters' voices, and establishes a parallel with the characters'contradictory power over each other; the ploys of the narrator recall and parody the authoritarian regime which is reflected in the novel. The narrator's authority is further defined in a reading of the novel in which author, narrator, reader and character become linguistic constructs in a textual play, and meanings emerge at variance with the authorized commentary. MARIE MURPHY is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Loyola College in Maryland.