Latina/o Literature and
Literature of the Americas at the
University of Northern Colorado

Death of Jose Donoso

(From Reuter's News Service)

SANTIAGO, Chile (Dec. 7, 1996) -- Chilean novelist Jose Donoso, whose books mixed surrealism with black comedy, died Saturday in Santiago at the age of 71, his publishers said.

Donoso had been ill for at least two years, according to a spokesman for the publishers, Alfaguara.

Donoso, whose novels included "Coronacion" (Coronation) and "El Obsceno pajaro de la noche" (The Obscene Bird of the Night), died at his home in the Chilean capital, surrounded by friends and family members, the spokesman said.

Donoso was Chile's best-known novelist and one of the leading writers of the Latin American literary boom that began in the 1960s.

End Reuter's Report

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BOOKS / LIBROS / BOOKS / LIBROS

Among Jose Donoso's recent published works in English are:

Donoso, Jose

CURFEW

(Grove Press, 310 pages, $12 pages)

AUTHOR: Jose Donoso was born in 1924 in Santiago, Chile. After three years at the Instituto Pedagogico of the University of Chile, he was awarded a Doherty Foundation Scholarship for two years' study at Princeton, where he received his B.A. in 1951. He has taught English language and literature at the Instituto Pedagogico of the Catholic University of Santiago and held an appointment in the School of Journalism at the University of Chile. In 1956 he received Santiago's Municipal Prize for short stories, and later the Chile-Italia Prize for Journalism. In 1962 he received the William Faulkner Foundation Prize for Coronation, the first of his novels to be published in the United States. Jose Donoso was visiting lecturer at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1965 to 1967. His other books include The Obscene Bird of Night (1973), Sacred Families (1977) and A House in the Country (1983), which was awarded the Critics' Prize in Spain. He lived in Europe for 15 years, but now makes his home in Chile with his wife and daughter.

NOTES: Suzanne Ruta of The New York Times Book Review writes: "Curfew is a political novel that is also an urbane comedy of manners, a love story, a fairy tale, a thriller, a lyric evocation of landscapes." The Baltimore Sun writes: "A believable lucid portrait of life in Chile today."

Donoso, Jose

THE GARDEN NEXT DOOR

((C)1993, Grove Press, 242 pages, $18.95 hardcover, ISBN: 0-8021-1238-2) and ((C)1993, Grove Press, 243 pages, $11 paperback)

AUTHOR: Born in 1924, Jose Donoso is recognized as one of the great writers of the South American Boom generation. Coronation, his first novel to be translated into English, won the William Faulkner Foundation Prize in 1962. Living first the United States, then in Spain, Donoso spent18 years out of Chile, where he again resides.

NOTES: A Chilean writer named Julio and his wife, Floria, are at a low point in their lives. Constantly bickering, the pair are beset by worries about money, their writing, and their son (who may or may not by playing the oldest profession in Marrakesh). When Julio's boyhood best friend, now a famous artist, lends the couple his luxurious Madrid apartment for the summer, it is an escape for both - but in particular for Julio, who fantasizes about the garden next door and the erotic life of the lovely young aristrocratic woman who inhabits it.

Donoso, Jose

TARATUTA AND STILL LIFE WITH PIPE

((C)1990, W. W. Norton & Company,158 pages, $17.95 hardcover) and ((C)1990, W.W. Norton & Company, 158 pages, $11.99 paperback, ISBN: 0-393-31164-3)

AUTHOR: Jose Donoso lives in Santiago, Chile. He has received Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships twice and has been a guest writer and lecturer at many universities including the Iowa Writers' Workshop. NOTES: These two novellas distill the major concerns of his writing career: the confusion of politics, the indeterminancy of a stable reality, the strangeness of love, and the process of creating and evaluating art. Taratuta is a story about history and about writing. In "Still Life With Pipe," Donoso continues his discussion on the limits of art. He tells of Marcos Ruiz Gallardo who trades his obsession with money for an obsession in art.

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INTERVIEWS / ENTREVISTAS / INTERVIEWS

Marta Mestrovic, a frequent contributor to "Publisher's Weekly," interviewed Jose Donoso in 1992. This is an excerpt from the article, which appeared in Publisher's Weekly on 30 November, 1992.

By Marta Mestrovic

In "The Garden Next Door," a middle-aged Chilean writer who has never quite achieved the popularity of other Latin American authors of the same generation fails at writing the "great Chilean social novel," the masterpiece that is supposed to secure his place in modern literature. Simultaneously, through a blur of alcohol and Valium, he and his wife watch their marriage dissolve, then resurrect itself.

The Chilean writer Jose Donoso is the author of "The Garden Next Door." Since he is known for his experimental works, readers may well suspect that despite the realism with which events are depicted, nothing here is quite what it seems. Indeed, in a satisfying surprise ending, the reader discovers that this is a novel within a novel; rather than being related by an embittered male narrator, the story has actually been written by the protagonist's wife. And the novel does turn out to be a sucessful work, one snapped up by the Spanish literary community.

The switch of narrators, which lifts the novel from a minor to a major key, is one of the clever literary devices of the book ...

... "PW" is prompted to ask him (Jose Donoso) why he decided to end his book in this way.

His answer is hesitant, musing, "I guess I always wanted my wife to be a writer. She has always been a very literary person, and I always had a feeling that if she had become a writer, she'd be on better terms with herself. After I wrote this book, she did write a book of her own - an entertaining, wonderful book of memoirs."

For the full article, consult "Publisher's Weekly," Nov. 30, 1992, page. 30.

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INTERVIEW / ENTREVISTA / INTERVIEW

By Jose Tono Martinez and translated by S. Kellum in the article "Jose Donoso: Losing My Identity and My Roots Was a Task Worth Undertaking."

JOSE TONO MARTINEZ: You work has been described as existentialist and pessimistic, with shadown and veiled characters who obey a lesser god or an indecipherable destiny. To what personal vision does all that respond?

JOSO DONOSO: That's not the way I go about it. It's not that one creates an abstract thought and from here proceeds to the specific, from the objective to the literary. In my case, there is no search for a clear intellectual message. It's true that my novels are pessimistic, and it's also true that I came into the (literary) world when what was being read was the work of (Jean Paul) Sartre and (Albert) Camus, in the 1940s. All of it left a deep imprint on me that I have not erased. But I have never attempted to work from an articulated message. I believe that messages and literature are totally at odds with each other. There is also humor in my books, a macabre humor full of ghostly figures like those of (Ramon del) Valle Inclan and this diversion keeps my fiction from being monochromatic.

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Jose Donoso will be missed.

Information compiled and filed by

Ruben Sosa Villegas

Rocky Mountain News

400 West Colfax Ave.

Denver, CO 80204