SOURCE: Friedman, Mary Lusky. “The Genesis of La desesperanza by José Donoso.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23, no. 2 (summer 1999): 255-74.

In the following essay, Friedman examines the working notes for La desesperanza and concludes that the novel evolved from Donoso's preoccupation with the ambivalence between parents and children and the possibility of identity transformed.

These days a special apology must be made for studying the process by which a writer makes a literary text. So politically incorrect has it become to consider a writer's intentions that some critics nowadays not only look askance at a writer's diaries and notes but even sidestep the term “work,” which alludes to the creation of literature by a particular human being. What amounts to postmodern prudishness about the conception and gestation of a work of art needs resisting. Often a look at the process by which a work is made sheds light...