SOURCE: Borinsky, Alicia. “Closing the Book—Dogspeech: José Donoso.” In Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, pp. 118-31. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

In this chapter from her full-length study of several contemporary Latin American writers, Borinsky takes a deconstructive approach to several works by Donoso, with particular reference to images of dogs as representations of omniscient hopelessness.

Fear and Story-telling

García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera offers its French-speaking parrot as a way of parodying the continuation of francophilia with the pleasures of literature. In José Donoso's A House in the Country¹ we also encounter the use of French to allude to the puzzles of literary convention, this time in the form of a game called “La marquesa salió a las cinco” played by some characters in the novel; the game's title is a translation of Paul Valéry's...