SOURCE: "Pathetic Falla-City: Donoso's 'Una señora'," Symposium, Vol. 38, No. 4, Winter, 1984-85, pp. 267-77.

In the following essay, Alonso views the story "Una señora " as an exploration of the tensions between humanity and city life, as well as the postmodern conceit of literature as "a shell that encompasses only itself "

The short stories of José Donoso have not received the sustained critical attention that has been accorded his novelistic production. Chronologically, the great majority of them fall in the period immediately preceding the so-called "Boom," if we acquiesce to the received date of 1961 as the unofficial beginning of the surge in modern Latin American letters.¹ Donoso's first collection of short stories, Veraneo y otros cuentos, was published in 1955. El charlestón, the Chilean writer's other collection of short fiction appeared in print in 1960.² This temporal marginality vis-à-vis the "Boom" is symbolic of the way Donoso's short...