[José Donoso] has emerged from the generation of 1950 as Chile's most widely acclaimed contemporary novelist…. [He] is now considered a major figure in the great "boom" of the Latin American novel along with others like Fuentes, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Cabrera Infante.

What is peculiar about "el fenómeno José Donoso" is the scarcity of critics who have really studied him in great depth. Those who have done so have focused attention mainly on what is most obvious in his novels: the continued development of a single theme—the decay of a rigidly structured Chilean society. Old and crumbling ancestral mansions, aging servants, families who spiritually and physically crucify each other, congenital insanity, insinuations of incest, the rank odor of things gone old and sour—these are the elements in Donoso's novels which lead some critics to believe that he is "un recio novelista y...