SOURCE: Magnarelli, Sharon. “Sacred Families: Reading and Writing Power.” In Understanding José Donoso, pp. 119-32. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Magnarelli explores the ways in which Donoso's ostensibly realistic portrayal of bourgeois life in Sacred Families actually conceals a more complex examination of the power of representational aesthetic works.

Although Tres novelitas burguesas (Sacred Families, literally “Three Bourgeois Novellas”), published in 1973 by Seix Barral, returns to the shorter genres of Donoso's earlier career, it nonetheless proffers a prolongation and amplification of the themes and preoccupations of The Obscene Bird of Night. As was the case in his masterpiece, the major concerns of the trilogy are art and discourse, their power, and the effect they exercise on bourgeois society. In these works Donoso probes the instruments of representational art and shows them to be the same instruments by which our social structures are created...