Charleston and Other Stories by Jose Donoso. Boston. 1977. Godine. Translated From The Spanish By Andree Conrad. 177 pages. 0879231971.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In the world of Jose Donoso, all is not what it seems. Behind the bland rituals of everyday life lurk impulses that can disturb and even destroy. In these crisp, impeccably written stories, the great Chilean writer follows with precision and compassion the emergence of such impulses: an otherwise nondescript office worker becomes crazed by a bizarre obsession that at first seems innocent enough; an American boy living in a remote Mexican village is destroyed by forces beyond his control; a man is overpowered by his passion for sleeping. Many of these stories are explorations of perception. Children play large parts in them, either as participants or as perceivers; with their peculiar sensitivity they are aware of what their elders recognize only dimly, if at all. In ‘Ana Maria’ a charming but somehow terrifying child undermines the lives of an elderly couple; in ‘A Walk’ the disintegration of a formal bourgeois household is observed through the eyes of a boy. But for all the subtleties of these tales, Donoso is first and foremost a storyteller. They begin, as do all stories; but unlike some stories, they also end firmly with the reader carried along from first word to last.
José Donoso Yáñez (October 5, 1924–December 7, 1996) was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States (Iowa) and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he said his exile was also a form of protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He returned to Chile in 1981 and lived there until his death. Donoso is the author of a number of remarkable stories and novels, which contributed greatly to the Latin American literary boom. The term 'Boom' was coined in his 1972 essay Historia personal del ‘boom’. His best known works include the novels Coronación, El lugar sin límites (The Place Without Limits) and El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night). His works deal with a number of themes, including sexuality, the duplicity of identity, psychology, and a sense of dark humor. After his death, his personal papers at the University of Iowa revealed his homosexuality; a revelation that caused a certain controversy in Chile.