Background
José Donoso was born on October 5, 1924, in Santiago, Chile, into a well-to-do family of lawyers and doctors. Son of the doctor José Donoso Donoso and Alicia Yáñez, niece of the writer Eliodoro Yanez, founder of the newspaper La Nación.
( A Chilean writer named Julio and his wife Gloria are be...)
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.
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(This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a mas...)
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)
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( Winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Tr...)
Winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation José Donoso was the leading Chilean representative of the Latin American Boom of the sixties and seventies that included Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Manuel Puig, among others. Written as a draft in 1973, set aside, and forgotten, The Lizards Tale was discovered among Donosos 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. Suzanne Jill Levine, who knew Donoso and translated two of his earlier works, brings the book to an English-language audience for the first time. Defeated and hiding in his Barcelona apartment, painter Antonio Muñoz-RoaDonosos alter egorelates 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. In Levines able hands, Donosos clear prose shines through, forming a compact, powerful, and still-relevant meditation on the commercialization of art and the very places we inhabit.
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( Andrés, solitario y cincuentón, es el desconcertado tes...)
Andrés, solitario y cincuentón, es el desconcertado testigo de los últimos días de una abuela nonagenaria que se debate entre la niebla y los relámpagosde la demencia. Esperpéntica a la vez que realista, la primera novela del más célebre narrador chileno de este fin de siglo prefigura los temas que marcarán su obra: decadencia, identidad, transgresión y locura... En esta obra, el lector despierta a una realidad grosera, dondelos personajes desnudan sus recuerdos y la historia dealgunas rancias familias santiaguinas, encerradas en caserones que nutren sus obsesiones más oscuras. Un clásico de la novela latinoamericana.
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(Explains how the so-called Boom came into being, linking ...)
Explains how the so-called Boom came into being, linking changes in the Spanish American novel to the growing sophistication among Latin American writers
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(An authentic and sincere report on Carlos Fuentes, MarioV...)
An authentic and sincere report on Carlos Fuentes, MarioVargas Losa, Julio Cortazar and others. This edition includes two appendixes. The first iswritten by Donoso's wife and includes an intimate look into a group of Hispanic American writers. The second part is written by Donoso himself, and looks at the remain of the Boom and discovers resolutions, fame and the heirs of Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa , and others.
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( En esta novela, considerada la obra cumbre de José Dono...)
En esta novela, considerada la obra cumbre de José Donoso, la voz que narra fluye infatigable de los labios del Mudito, como en un viaje desde el ser hacia la nada, elaborando un mundo destinado, por la maldición intrínseca de la existencia, al deterioro, la pérdida o la confusión de cualquier identidad posible. Las viejas que pueblan la Casa de la Encarnación de la Chimba y los monstruos de la Rinconada ilustran cada matiz de la desesperación y cada uno de los ínfimos placeres cotidianos, anudando siempre al ciego instinto de la vida un inextinguible terror ante lo oscuro, lo innombrable, lo que ya no tiene forma.
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(Gustavo Zuleta, un profesor de literatura chileno, acepta...)
Gustavo Zuleta, un profesor de literatura chileno, acepta una oferta para trabajar en una universidad del medioeste norteamericano. Mientras espera a su mujer y a su hijo recién nacido. Zuleta descubre los contrastes exasperados de la vida académica. De la mano de Ruby, una joven encantadoramente gorda y misteriosa, el protagonista será testigo de envidias, resentimientos y ambiciones de poder, de relaciones sexuales cruzadas e, incluso, de un asesinato múltiple. Escrito con el paso ágil y el humor ácido de una comedia negra. Donde van a morir los elefantes es una metáfora implacable de las relaciones conflictivas que los intelectuales latinoamericanos mantienen con la cultura norteamericana. Y reflexiona con lucidez sobre la condición de la mujer, el lugar actual de la literatura, las nuevas tecnologías y la obsesión por el prestigio y la eficacia. Con esta nueva y excepcional novela de José Donoso, Alfaguara inicia la publicación de la obra narrativa completa de uno de los mas grandes autores en lengua española de este siglo.
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( Curfew takes place during one twenty-four hour period i...)
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.
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(Aunque las tres novelitas reunidas en esta edición perten...)
Aunque las tres novelitas reunidas en esta edición pertenecen a épocas distintas de la producción donosiana, todas ellas exploran el lugar del arte y la literatura en la vida cotidiana y doméstica. "Átomo verde número cinco" es una de las Tres novelitas burguesas (1973) que parodian a la clase media catalana mediante una mezcla de realismo irónico y literatura fantástica. "El tiempo perdido" apareció originalmente en Cuatro para Delfina (1982) y es un grotesco retrato de la bohemia santiaguina de los años cuarenta. Y "Naturaleza muerta con cachimba" (1990) pone de relieve el patético destino del arte de vanguardia que termina en el anonimato de un museo provinciano.
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(In the world of José Donoso, all is not what it seems. Be...)
In the world of José Donoso, all is not what it seems. Behind the bland rituals of everyday life lurk impulses that can disturb and even destroy. In these crisp, impeccably written stories, the great Chilean writer follows with precision and compassion the emergence of such impulses: an otherwise nondescript office worker becomes crazed by a bizarre obsession that at first seems innocent enough; an American boy living in a remote Mexican village is destroyed by forces beyond his control; a man is overpowered by his passion for sleeping. Many of these stories are explorations of perception. Children play large parts in them, either as participants or as perceivers; with their peculiar sensitivity they are aware of what their elders recognize only dimly, if at all. In "Ana María," a charming but somehow terrifying child undermines the lives of an elderly couple; in "A Walk," the disintegration of a formal bourgeois household is observed through the eyes of a boy. But for all the subtleties of these tales, Donoso is first and foremost a story teller. They begin, as do all stories, but unlike some stories, they also end firmly with the reader carried along from first word to last.
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(When the adults of the Ventura family go off on a picnic,...)
When the adults of the Ventura family go off on a picnic, the games of the children turn real and develop into a brutal power struggle
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394509498/?tag=2022091-20
( A reprint of the powerful novel by Chilean writers, Jos...)
A reprint of the powerful novel by Chilean writers, José Donoso.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1892295148/?tag=2022091-20
José Donoso was born on October 5, 1924, in Santiago, Chile, into a well-to-do family of lawyers and doctors. Son of the doctor José Donoso Donoso and Alicia Yáñez, niece of the writer Eliodoro Yanez, founder of the newspaper La Nación.
As a child he attended the "The Grange, " an English day school where he remained for a decade and learned English well. As a youth, he dropped out of school, traveled about to various places in Chile and abroad, and finally went back to finish his education at the University of Chile.
There he won a two year scholarship to Princeton University, where he took a B. A. in 1951.
He published his first two stories-in English-in the Princeton University campus literary magazine. After returning to Chile in 1952 Donoso held a series of teaching jobs while continuing to write stories. His first book of short stories, Summer Vacation (Veraneo), appeared in 1955 and received considerable critical notice. Success Came Early Donoso's fame was assured after Coronation appeared. This novel describes a family of Santiago's aristocratic society fallen into decay.
A 90-ish grandmother rules in her imposing Victorian mansion over the remnants of her family-mainly her weakling grandson-and a bevy of servants. The book is filled with grotesque figures and situations, a constant in Donoso's work. Though the satire of upper class life seems cruel at times, Donoso also wrote of his characters with compassion and humor.
The reader of the tales in El Charleston will probably be fascinated by all the frustrations and the dark world of passions portrayed in them, especially among members of the Chilean upper middle class, and also by the contrast with understatement found in the British style of Jane Austen or Henry James.
During 1965-1967 Donoso taught creative writing at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. His second and third novels, This Sunday (Este domingo, 1966) and Place without Limits (Ellugar sin límites, 1967), were published in quick succession. This Sunday contains some lively, vivid characters, and the dramatic conflicts within them and between them sharpen the reader's interest.
Especially noteworthy is the young narrator's grandmother Chepa, a wealthy society lady who devotes herself to charities and the poor, and Maya, a bum who is the chief recipient of her benevolence. The relationships between these two and other members of the narrator's family are complicated and filled with repressed violence which finally bursts out, bringing them to a tragic ending.
As in Coronation and in his stories, houses and other inanimate things take on life under Donoso's powerfully descriptive pen. Symbols abound and sensations are stressed-for example, the long opening scene describes the delicious smells wafted through the house by Violeta's Sunday dinner meat pies, and these empanadas recur as a motif throughout the book.
For a number of years Donoso and his family lived in Spain (Madrid, Mallorca, near Barcelona), and in this latter city his most ambitious novel, The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pájaro de la noche), was published in 1970. While he was writing this lengthy book, which took several years to accomplish, Donoso confessed that he passed through spells of "madness"-paranoia, hallucinations, split personality, and suicide attempts.
The Obscene Bird of Night, with its catchy title-a phrase Donoso found in a letter written by Henry James, Sr. to his sons-is undoubtedly a masterpiece.
This sprawling, obscure, fascinating, imaginative, 540-page novel is concerned with large problems of identity, the losing of oneself in a plurality of masks. The leading character, Humberto Peñaloza, goes through all kinds of character changes, real or imaginary.
The first of these changes is motivated by the insignificance of his lowly social origins in Chilean society and his intense wish to be somebody. Later he is moved by his own feelings of inadequacy or frustration and strong desires for self-destruction.
There is one long fantastic section of the novel devoted entirely to depicting a world of real physical monsters, where normal intruders become the monsters. The plot and structure, though carefully ordered, seem chaotic. The Bird reminds us of the distorted world of Goya's dark period and the nightmarish quality of Bosch's paintings, such as "The Seven Deadly Sins. " It evokes a world filled with terror and dreams, myth and legend, at the same time that it dissects various levels of society with a sharp eye.
After The Bird, Donoso continued to turn out novels, including Country House (Casa de campo, 1978) and The Garden Next Door (El jardín de al lado, 1981) and shorter pieces of fiction, such as Three Bourgeois Novelettes (Tres novelitas burguesas, 1973) and the erotic novel The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria (La misteriosa desaparición de la Marquesita de Loria, 1980).
About 1980 Donoso returned to his homeland of Chile. Donoso reflected this philosophy in The Garden Next Door (1981), which conveyed a strong theme of exile, and in Despair (Desesperanza, 1986), which revolved around the theme of homecoming. He also felt that he could make a larger contribution to society and the literary world writing from his homeland.
Author of numerous critically acclaimed works during this period, Donoso was awarded Chile's Premio Nacional in 1990. Among his later novels were: Curfew, Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe: Two Novellas (Taratuta. Naturaleza muerta con cachimba (1990), Hell Has No Limits, and Cuatro para Delfina (1982).
Throughout his writing the reader is aware of layer upon layer of "wrappings" around his characters' identities, so much so that some critics believe that the imposed masks or disguises become the character's identity.
Donoso died of cancer in 1996 at the age of 72. José Donoso died in his house in Santiago Chile the 7th of December 1996. On his deathbed, according to popular belief, he asked that they read him the poems of Altazor of Vicente Huidobro. His remains were buried in the cemetery of a spa located in the province of Petorca, 80 kilometers from Valparaíso.
( En esta novela, considerada la obra cumbre de José Dono...)
( Winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Tr...)
(Cuando se publicó en 1966 la novela El lugar sin límites ...)
(Aunque las tres novelitas reunidas en esta edición perten...)
( A Chilean writer named Julio and his wife Gloria are be...)
(This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as "a mas...)
( Andrés, solitario y cincuentón, es el desconcertado tes...)
(Explains how the so-called Boom came into being, linking ...)
(This semi-autobiographical novel is a stunning example of...)
(When the adults of the Ventura family go off on a picnic,...)
(New Edition In this book, José Donoso unveils the false...)
(Gustavo Zuleta, un profesor de literatura chileno, acepta...)
(In this book, Jose Donoso unveils the false appearances, ...)
( These striking novellas are the witty crystallizations ...)
(An authentic and sincere report on Carlos Fuentes, MarioV...)
(Coronacion COMO NUEVO spanishz Paperback Jan 01, 1968 Don...)
( Curfew takes place during one twenty-four hour period i...)
( A reprint of the powerful novel by Chilean writers, Jos...)
(In the world of José Donoso, all is not what it seems. Be...)
(Book by Donoso, Jose)
(Slight shelf wear. Price label on cover. Pages are clean ...)
(Barcelona. 1978. Seix Barral. 20x13. 498p.)
The 1980s and 1990s, he felt, were a time when writers abandoned their desire to prescribe remedies for the world's ills, and instead focused on interpreting individual life stories.
Quotations: Interviewed years later by Fernando Ainsa for the UNESCO Courier (1994), Donoso spoke of exile, his own as well as the literary theme of exile, "Wherever people go, whatever they do, they take their homeland, their home town, with them, and there is no way of going into voluntary exile from one's own self, whatever some people may think or claim to the contrary. The primary reason why I returned to Chile was homesickness, which gets worse as one gets older. .. ."
He was a rebellious student, hating school work and compulsory sports, and, according to his own account, "this collective experience may have determined my lifelong incapacity to belong to groups of any kind-political, social or recreational. "
After his death, his personal papers at the University of Iowa revealed his homosexuality, a revelation that caused a certain controversy in Chile.
He had been prone to imaginary illness since childhood when he had pretended to have stomach aches when he didn't want to go to school and he fooled his doctor father who diagnosed appendicitis. In adult life he was plagued by psychosomatic illness, and his imagined ulcers became real.
In 1961, he married with painter María Ester Serrano, known as María Pilar Donoso (1926–1997), daughter of the Chilean Juan Enrique Serrano and the Bolivian Graciela Mendieta. In 1967 he moved to Spain where his only child, a daughter, was born.
