[Coronation] is best described as a 19th-century novel, even though the people in it telephone their grocery orders to supermarkets and may, if they have the fare and the wish, fly to Europe. Everything about it is redolent of naturalism in its heyday: the clear-cut stratification of society into slum-dwellers driven to crime and fastidious, cultivated rentiers, with only a parasitic servant class in between; the Buddenbrooksian theme of a great family in decay; the shuddering Schopenhaueresque preoccupation with personal annihilation; and at the centre of the web, the old mad woman in a rambling, shuttered, antiquated house, Tante Dide or, better, Miss Havisham; indeed, by accident or design Señor Donoso has given the old lady's maid-companion the name Estela. Yet the book wears no air of pastiche; one is almost convinced that Chile may be just such an anachronistic preserve; and Coronation has the immeasurable advantage...