SOURCE: A review of Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 14, 1993, p. 6.

[The following article provides a brief review of Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe.]

Does art imitate life or vice versa? Or is the relationship between the two subtler and more playful than either of these maxims suggests? This is what José Donoso, one of Chile's leading novelists (The Obscene Bird of Night), would conclude, offering us these two novellas as evidence.

In Taratuta, a writer tries to uncover the truth about a minor character in the Russian Revòlution, a red-bearded crony of Lenin's whose specialty was "expropriating" (stealing) money for the Bolshevik treasury. The man's true name, character and activities slide into the chinks of biased or slipshod histories and disappear. The narrator's reconstruction of the revolutionaries' exile in Paris is almost entirely fiction, but the fact that...