Word: donoso
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SACRED FAMILIES by JOSÉ DONOSO 206 pages. Knopf...
...DONOSO 192 pages. Godine...
...Donoso, 53, demonstrated these qualities in such novels as This Sunday and The Obscene Bird of Night (1973). He remains confidently cosmopolitan in his themes and techniques. Chilean by birth, the author was educated at Princeton, spent time as a writer in residence at the University of Iowa and currently lives on the outskirts of Barcelona, the setting for three eerie and witty novellas linked in Sacred Families...
...when Donoso starts pulling his fanciful strings, a model named Sylvia is revealed as a sapient dummy whose arms can be popped from their sockets and whose features can be wiped away. To her lover, Anselmo, Sylvia is an ideal of female submissiveness. But Sylvia has a trick up her armless sleeve. A subtle application of vanishing cream causes Anselmo's sex to disappear-just before his return home to his wife...
...stories in Charleston are flatter in tone and more realistic. Yet Donoso's themes of youthful magic and distorted middle-aged passions are still evident. Children have the power to enchant and destroy; dogs and cats provide unusual escapes for the trapped and the lonely. Donoso balances lean, graceful prose with a sense of the psychological arabesque. It is a fine combination for modern ghost stories in which the reader may recognize phan toms of himself. R.Z. Sheppard