SOURCE: "Caught in a Sweet Trap," in The New York Times Book Review, January 10, 1993, p. 11.

[In the following review, Talbot contends that The Garden Next Door is about exiles who have fled dictatorships to live out their lives in more pleasant places. Commenting on the autobiographical aspects of the story, Talbot claims the novel to be about "our universal terror of disintegration when everything seems to be losing its meaning."]

Latin American fiction, since the boom of the 1960's, has been identified with the novel that is bigger than life: Jungles teeming with extravagance, grotesqueness, fantasy and absurdity. How else to make sense of the Latin American reality? José Donoso, Chile's most prominent fiction writer, is the author of one of these multilayered books, the highly acclaimed 1973 novel The Obscene Bird of Night. But in his 1981 work The Garden Next Door, the novel bigger-than-life retreats into the backyard...