Word: donoso
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MOST SUBTLE STORY TELLERS barely hint at underlying conflicts; instead they use them throughout their stories as sources of vitality. Chilean novelist Joe Donoso has taken the art of raising questions one step further. In his third novel, A House in the Country,which has recently appeared in English translation, he brings up complex issues even outside of those involved in the actual story...
...Donoso sets his simple, seemingly linear story in an isolated country park. The Ventura family, consisting of seven siblings, their spouses and their 33 children, has made its fortune on a family-owned gold mine in an unnamed South American country. Each summer they retreat from the capital city to their country home, built near their gold mine and surrounded by profile fields of thistle. Each autumn, the thistles seed, the air gets too thick to breathe, and the Ventura family returns to the city...
...Donoso reinforces the wild improbability of his story with characters that can only be called surrealistic--a four-year-old boy, for example, whose mother insists on dressing in as a girl and whose intelligence is far out of proportion to his age. Donoso's remarkable combination of clarity and richness--preserved in translation--make the lurid plausible...
Invaders appear, or seem to: cannibals, neighboring peasants, armed servants intent on recapturing the house for their masters, although visions of rebellion motivate a few of these as well. Donoso, 59, keeps this panorama of victories and defeats moving through exhaustive permutations in high gear, and the translation from Spanish by David Pritchard and Suzanne Jill Levine proceeds vigorously. Imaginative enchantments pop up everywhere: the ballroom at Marulanda, where the real exits, amid a host of trompe l'oeil imitations, are considered false; the elaborately thwarted arabesque performed by a wife who offers her husband younger women...
...Donoso's magic is munificent but chilly; he aims to beguile the senses rather than engage them. Near the end, he closes up shop: "The curtain must now fall and the lights come up; my characters will take off their masks, I will pull down the sets, put away the props." Few will regret attending this dazzling performance; some may wish that they had been allowed to care more about the play. -By Paul Gray...