SOURCE: Lipski, John M. “‘Evolution Through Paradox: El obsceno pájaro de la noche and Casa de campo.’” In The Creative Process in the Works of José Donoso edited by Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliú, pp. 35-46. Rock Hill, S.C.: Winthrop Studies on Major Modern Writers, 1982.

In the following essay, Lipski examines two of Donoso's best-known novels, articulating their intertextuality and their intended interactions with the reader.

Like the majority of other major writers of his generation, José Donoso has been at work creating an extensive intertext, not through overlapping plots and characters but rather by means of a progressive narrative evolution, a gradual expanding and enriching of epistemological and linguistic possibilities as each work gives rise to the succeeding one. Donoso excells in reinforcing thematic elements of his works by the narrative structures in which he chooses to present them and his writing represents a continual confrontation with...