SOURCE: "Witchcraft in Three Stories of José Donoso," Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 3, No. 6, Spring/Summer, 1975, pp. 3-8.

In the following essay, Fraser asserts that the stories "Veraneo," "Paseo," and "Santelices" exemplify Donoso's technique of combining social and political realism with elements of the occult and supernatural

A paradoxical phenomenon characterizes contemporary Spanish American literature. As Jorge Luis Borges has interpreted this paradox in his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," the tradition of Spanish American literature is that of Europe and the West, all of Western culture, the Universe. For Borges, Spanish American literature is truly national when not defined solely in terms of national traits.¹ Evidence of his contention appears in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels." We view illustrations of the paradox in authors such as Julio...