by Jose Donoso

Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1924, José Donoso published his first collection of stories, Veraneo y otros cuentos (Summer Vacation and Other Stories), in 1955 and two years later his first novel, Coronación (Coronation), for which he won the William Faulkner Foundation Prize for Latin American Literature in 1962. With Coronación, Donoso established himself in Chile as the leading novelist of his generation. In 1964 Donoso and his wife, María del Pilar Serrano, left Chile to attend a writers’ conference in Mexico. They would not return until 1981. With the publication in 1970 of El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night), Donoso achieved an international reputation. A House in the Country is his most highly praised novel since Obscene Bird of Night, and the first of what some have viewed as a triptych of political...