Donoso, José, << duh NOH soh, hoh ZAY >> (1924-1996), was an important Chilean novelist and short-story writer. He was a major figure in the Boom , a period in Latin American literature from the late 1950’s through the early 1970’s. Much of Donoso’s fiction describes the tensions between Chile’s upper and lower classes. Like other Boom writers, Donoso experimented with language and structure, mixing fantasy, myths, legends, social satire, and the strange. He frequently wrote about the psychological isolation of writers and exiles.
Donoso became best known for his novel The Obscene Bird of Night (1970). An unsuccessful writer named Umberto is the narrator of the novel. He takes a job as a tutor to the deformed son and only heir of an aristocratic family. The novel takes on a nightmarish quality, mingling the past and the present, with characters undergoing freakish transformations, sometimes flowing into each other.
Donoso won praise for his first novel, Coronation (1957). The novel tells the story of the decline of the Chilean aristocracy as represented by a mentally unstable woman, her grandson, and their servants. Donoso’s other novels include This Sunday (1965), Hell Has No Limits (1966), A House in the Country (1978), The Garden Next Door (1981), Curfew (1986), and Conjectures About the Memory of My Tribe (1996). His short stories were collected in Charleston (1960). Sacred Families (1973) combines three short novels. Donoso discussed his literary development in the memoir The Boom in Spanish American Literature (1972).
José Donoso Yáñez was born on Oct. 5, 1924, in Santiago, Chile. He won a two-year scholarship to Princeton University in the United States, earning a B.A. degree there in 1951. He left Chile in 1964 and taught at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1965 to 1967 and at Colorado State University in 1969. Donoso lived for a time in Mexico City before settling in Spain. He returned to Chile in 1980 and became a strong critic of the government of the military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Donoso died on Dec. 7, 1996.
