SOURCE: Swanson, Philip. “José Donoso and La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria.” In The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom, pp. 92-113. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

In the following chapter from his book on Latin American literature after the “Boom,” Swanson presents a semiotic reading of La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, including commentary on the ideas of previous critics of the work.

In a newspaper article in 1982, José Donoso lamented the almost exclusive association of Latin American fiction with long, complex, experimental, ‘totalising’ works and asked: ‘¿No ha llegado un momento de ruptura para la novela latinoamericana, de cambio … ?’.¹ A couple of years previously, in 1980, he had published La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria, probably the most surprising departure from his very own long, complex, experimental, ‘totalising’ novel from the height of...