José Donoso Critical Essay | José Donoso

Critical Review by James Polk

SOURCE: "Labyrinth of the Narrative," in Washington Post, No. 124, April 8, 1993, p. D2.

[In the following review, Polk lauds the two novellas Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe. He asserts that Donoso continues to focus on the relationship between an artist and his art, and social realism, in the two works.]

First, a confession: Although I've reviewed all manner of contemporary fiction over the years, I'm still uneasy about using the word "postmodern" in a sentence.

But surely something different is going on in the work of the Chilean novelist José Donoso, perhaps even something that warrants the term. The richly imagined tapestry of The Obscene Bird of Night, his best known novel, is a tight fabric of ambiguity, stitched through with surreal highlights of switched identities and a meandering plot that falls apart and reassembles itself in unexpected places.

A recurring theme in much of Donoso's fiction...
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