José Donoso is the most prominent Chilean novelist of the twentieth century and one of that select group of Latin-American writers who achieved international notoriety in the 1960s. This was the decade of the Latin-American novel's modernization by cosmopolitan writers conversant with the most significant experiments of modernist fiction in Europe and the United States. In light of the transculturation of narrative forms that characterized the reinvention of the Latin-American novel, it is easy to forget that the early works of writers such as Donoso were more responsive to local traditions than prestigious foreign models of the moment: Donoso's early stories and novels cannot be properly understood outside the context of Chilean fiction around 1950.

During the first half of the twentieth century Chilean fiction was dominated by the regionalist novel, which interpreted national identity by documenting human, linguistic, and cultural types. The typical was found in the...