Chilean literature finds in José Donoso to its most transcendental narrator of the XNUMXth century. Not so much in the sense of narrative success, which also in part, although less than Isabel Allende, but because of the existentialist scope of his novels. A Donoso whose fellow countryman Scarmeta admired for his great social conscience.
The taste of literary delicacy summarizes precisely what Donoso proposes in any of the genres he played. Because the question is to get us to soak up their characters, to remain spellbound in the plot while enjoying that relevant, clairvoyant, ecstatic intellectual depth.
Everything assails us with brilliance and formal conciseness, with that synthesis of the virtuoso of the letters. Then there is the bitter aftertaste of existentialism made nuances from loss, heartbreak, disenchantment, although all this compensated with an intense, very lively and colorful lyricism. Balances only at the height of geniuses like Donoso with souls capable of harboring and translating the whole range of possible visions of life.
Top 3 recommended novels by José Donoso
The obscene bird of the night
The dreamlike is that undeniable reflection of our reality. A mental construct that is sometimes more openly manifest and other times transformed into dark monsters of hidden meaning beneath our unspeakable drives. The question is the magical transformation that Donoso achieves in this novel, the collusion of reality and fiction, the communion between the completely subjective to the fantastical with the most certain pain in my feet from traveling in this world.
A journey through the labyrinths of identity, degradation and oblivion. The top novel by José Donoso.
The voice that narrates The Obscene Bird of the Night flows tirelessly from the lips of the Dopey, as if on a journey from being to nothingness, creating a world destined, by the intrinsic curse of existence, to deterioration, loss or confusion. of any possible identity.
The old women that populate the House of the Incarnation of La Chimba and the monsters of La Rinconada illustrate every nuance of despair and every one of the smallest daily pleasures, always knotting the blind instinct of life with an inextinguishable terror in the face of the dark, the unnameable , what no longer has form.
"The obscene bird of the night exhibits in its pages one of the greatest paradoxes that defined the work of its author: a tale of monsters as a representation of the best tradition of our most realistic fiction."
Coronation
Donoso's debut feature already hinted at a transgressive intention, an open will to trace new literary paths between meanders and deltas that transform the narrative channel into changing landscapes to finally open up to the open sea where everything is possible, where each character gathers the ultimate meaning from the changing waters of existence.
Andrés, lonely and in his fifties, is the bewildered witness of the last days of a nonagenarian grandmother who is torn between the fog and lightning of dementia.
Sperpentic as well as realistic, the first novel by the most famous Chilean narrator of this end of the century foreshadows the themes that will mark his work: decadence, identity, transgression and madness ...
In this work, the reader awakens to a rude reality, where the characters reveal their memories and the history of some rancid Santiago families, locked in mansions that nourish their darkest obsessions.
A classic of the Latin American novel.
Where elephants go to die
America. The part for the whole. In the comfortable patrimonialization of the United States over the entire continent, the most marked grievances end up being born. But also the most notorious contradictions between a Hispanic world colonized by the Yankee despite everything.
An acidic, black and implacable metaphor about the conflictive relations that Latin American intellectuals maintain with North American culture. A lucid reflection on the condition of women, the place of literature, new technologies and the obsession with prestige.
Gustavo Zuleta, a Chilean literature professor, accepts an offer to work at a university in the North American Midwest. While waiting for his wife and newborn son, Zuleta discovers the exasperated contrasts of academic life.
