SOURCE: "An Autopsy of a Generation," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 29, 1992, p. 7.

[In the following review, Bowden gives a brief plot summary of The Garden Next Door, and asserts that the book relies on images that conjure up "the emptiness of modern life."]

They sag with failure, are in their fifties, and live as exiles trapped in Spain with no money and no future. They possess but one asset-their pasts. Julio and Gloria fled Chile after Allende's fall. Julio had been a university professor of English literature, the author of two promising books, the son of a congressman, and she had been raised to be the proper wife of a professional man.

In Chilean José Donoso's bittersweet novel The Garden Next Door this does not prove to be sufficient material for starting a new life. Or even remembering their past lives. Julio struggles to rewrite a...