The Transparent Mystery of José Donoso
It’s hard for me to write about Donoso. We disagree about almost everything. I heard that when he was dying, he asked to have Huidobro’s Altazor read to him, and the image of Donoso on his deathbed listening to Altazor makes me sick. I don’t have anything against Huidobro, I like Huidobro, but how can a dying man ask to be read that poem? I don’t understand it. Or maybe I do, and then I understand it even less, as if Donoso were a mirror in which the essence of Chile and the essence of the writing life were reflected, and that double image, throbbing with sickness, superficiality, and indulgence, just makes me sad, because in it one can see, though only darkly, as Donoso would have liked, the ultimate poverty of the writing life and of national pride. The cup that he drank to the dregs.
Donoso wrote three good books. One of them very good and the other two powerful enough to linger in readers’ memories. The first is Hell Has No Limits, a book about desperation and precision. The others: The Obscene Bird of the Night, an ambitious and uneven novel, and The Garden Next Door, which presents itself as game and testament, and which, in the end — and this is not the least of the paradoxes of Donoso’s work — really was his literary testament. Among other things, The Garden Next Door tells the story of a failed Chilean writer who lives in Catalonia and doesn’t want to return to Chile. To return is to fail. To return, to accept yourself as you are, to allow others like you to accept you, to acknowledge you, on the sole condition that you accept and acknowledge them, becomes as bitter as a Latin American soccer player’s discovery that he isn’t wanted or needed in the European leagues anymore and that he must return to his home team. I’ve forgotten what choice Donoso’s character makes, whether he goes back or stays in Europe. Maybe he stays. Donoso never lost his taste for losers, combined with a rare (and unblinking) acceptance of bad luck. In any case, the decision, whatever it was, is irrelevant, because the defeat — and the humor, because this may be Donoso’s funniest novel — awaits him either way. For the protagonist of The Garden Next Door there is no exit anymore. After this novel, there’s no exit for José Donoso, the writer, either.