SOURCE: "Veiled Portraits: Donoso's Interartistic Dialogue in El jardin de al lado," in MLN, Vol. 103, No. 2, March, 1988, pp. 398-418.

[In the following essay, Feal discusses the "meta-confessional" nature of the narration in The Garden Next Door, and the masking, or mediated figure of the male author.]

José Donoso has characterized El jardín de al lado as his "most realistic novel to date; it is a psychological study and there are few masks although I imagine scholars will find them." He also claims that it is "the portrait of a middle-aged literary couple whose love is starting to give way and the political defeat somehow breaks them but they stick together." Donoso's classification of this work as a portrait is far from arbitrary, and he is right in imagining that students of the novel will find masks where he consciously placed few. On close examination, the novel engages...