SOURCE: "Home to Santiago: The Return of the Exile," in Book World—The Washington Post, May 22, 1988, p. 7.

[In the following review, Omang discusses the plot of Curfew, noting that this work is more accessible than any of Donoso's other novels. Containing less "magic realism" than his other books, Omang maintains that Curfew is a work of "riveting clarity."]

For two or three years after the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, the Chilean left was more or less in hiding, frightened, but somehow smug. In the slum apartments that hid them in Santiago, in their mountain hideouts and their Parisian exile cafes, the activists knew the dictator would fall any day now: there would be a popular rising, there would be revolution. There was no need to change tactics.

There was no need, in other words, to do more than paper over the doctrinal chasms...