It is quite interesting that the work of José Donoso … has often been described as traditionalist, traditionalist, that is, in the English sense, admiring as he does James and Austen. There has even been mention of the word costumbrismo, referring to the genre very much dear to nineteenth-century Spanish writers generally considered to be minor—except Larra, of course…. The stories [in El veraneo yotros cuentos] unquestionably give every evidence of a modest and perfectly calculated kind of realistic literary practice. But to see nothing more than this in the stories is to hide their insidious and quite beautifully disguised thematics.

In the title story, for instance, the whole nightmare of marital infidelity is reflected in a perverse and distorted way through the relationships of the various servants of the triangle, and through the way in which the appropriate children manipulate not only each other, but also the...