SOURCE: "Writing and Reading the Palimpsest: Donoso's El jardin de al lado," in Symposium, Vol. XLI, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 200-13.

[In the following essay, Melendez provides a detailed discussion of The Garden Next Door as a palimpsest. Focusing on the different narrative points of view in the novel, the dialectic between reading and writing, and the meaning of the garden, Melendez examines the concept of the palimpsest at length.]

To introduce the concept of palimpsest in a technological and computerized era might be perceived as an unnecessary irony or as the sign of reliance on an already exhausted metaphor. But the proliferation of intertexts, both perceptible and veiled, in José Donoso's El jardín de al lado (1981) reveals an archaic system, the palimpsest, linked to a process of writing or "publishing." This system functions as a literary metaphor in which the substitution of the object and its referent...