José Donoso Critical Essay | José Donoso

Critical Review by John Updike

SOURCE: "Shadows and Gardens," in New Yorker, Vol. LXIX, No. 26, August 16, 1993, pp. 86-9.

[In the following review, Updike contends that The Garden Next Door is "ruthless, deep and tender." The novel draws on several experiences of Donoso's life according to Updike, and centers the processes surrounding artistic creativity.]

In these last three or so decades, the novel has looked for urgency and energy to two bedevilled backwaters, Eastern Europe and Latin America. The rollback of Communism has left Eastern Europe's artistic compasses spinning, and the rollback of the dictators in South America has left the social terrain there somewhat flat, dreary, and ambiguous—of a piece with the bourgeois prairies to the north and in the overfarmed Old World. So it seems, at least, in two short novels by authors from the cone of our shapely sister continent: Shadows, by the Argentinian Osvaldo Soriano and The Garden Next...
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