SOURCE: "José Donoso's Narrative: The Other Side of Language," in Salmagundi, No. 82-83, Spring/Summer, 1989, pp. 258-68.

[In the following essay, Lertora discusses several of Donoso's works, focusing on the unusual approaches in narrative and structure that the author employed. Lertora notes Donoso's departure from realism, his use of magic and surrealism, and comments on the multiple narrators or points of view presented in Donoso's novels.]

A characteristic trait of the narrative produced by Spanish American writers like Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Julio Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, M. Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso, is its attempt to explore human experience by way of the secret codes associated with the instincts, the unconscious and magic. The discourse that founds these narratives is situated in the labyrinthic space of the characters' consciousness. Characters are no longer conceived as representatives of social class or as psychological types, but as subjects...