SOURCE: "The Burden of Chile's Night," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 10, 1989, p. 15.

[In the following review of Curfew, Roth reminisces about his years as a student and friend to Donoso. The critic also focuses much of the review on the political climate in Chile, General Pinochet, and the poet Pablo Neruda.]

I had not seen José Donoso for 30 years. Then, late last year, I visited him at U.C. Davis as he finished leading a three-month graduate seminar on himself and his work and prepared to return to Santiago. I remembered my high school teacher, a man in his early 30s, wearing alien Ivy League suits from Princeton, rocking from foot to foot as he yelped at the class to shut up and pay attention. I found one of El Boom's grand old men (aren't they all GOM's by now?), complete with white beard and hair...