The reviewer who gets spiritual refreshment out of pecking holes in books is not likely to have much fun with This Sunday. Turn it whichever way you like, it presents a clear-cut, uncompromising facet. I don't imply that it is gemlike in any precious sense of the term; only that it is so tight-textured and true-surfaced as to be, critically speaking, almost beak-proof….

José Donoso, scorning gimmicks and working with the small, hard stuff that is so difficult to come by, has produced a rare and curious book—an unspectacular original…. Donoso has demonstrated without fireworks that it is possible to write a lean and supple kind of prose without aping Hemingway, to dive deep without Dostoevskian ballast, to be evocative without effeminacy and poetic without ambiguity….

This Sunday is peopled by characters with wills of their own, who go to the devil in their own ways, rough-hewing...