Bøger af Jose Donoso

Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile's most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jeronimo's deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo's wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful-once upon a time... Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity.Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso's pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author's birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.

Curfew takes place during one twenty-four hour period in January 1985. Matilde Neruda, widow of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, has just passed away, and various factions are rallying to turn the event to their advantage: for Pinochet's junta, it represents a chance to assert political authority, while for the intellectuals who had basked in the Nerudas' light, it is an opportunity to grab the spoils of the estate. Against this backdrop of complex, often conflicting motivations, Donoso weaves a portrait of a society struggling to fashion a daily existence for itself, and of an intelligentsia vainly attempting to salvage the remnants of glory days long gone by. But Curfew is also a story of the tragic love between Judit Torre, an upper-middle-class radical who wants to escape her bitter past; and Manungo Vera, a native son returning after a successful career as a European pop singer. In the zone between documentary-like realism and grotesque absurdity, Jose Donoso evokes the suffocating atmosphere of a country under dictatorship, and its quietly devastating effect on the actions of those who live there.

Primera novela del gran autor chileno José Donoso en la que prefigura los temas que marcarán su obra: decadencia, identidad, transgresión y locura... Andrés, solitario y cincuentón, es el desconcertado testigo de los últimos días de una abuela nonagenaria que se debate entre la niebla y los relámpagos de la demencia. Esperpéntica a la vez que realista, la primera novela del más célebre narrador chileno de este fin de siglo prefigura los temas que marcarán su obra: decadencia, identidad, transgresión y locura...>Un clásico de la novela latinoamericana. «El más literario de los escritores de nuestra generación.' Carlos Fuentes ENGLISH DESCRIPTION This first novel from renowned Chilean author exposes the themes that would mark his future works: deterioration of society, identity questions, transgression and madness... Andres, a fifty year-old lonely man, is the bewildered witness of the last days of a ninety-plus year-old grandmother struggling with the ins and outs between the fog and clarity of dementia. Grotesque yet realistic at the same time, this first novel by the most famous Chilean narrator of the end of the last century, foreshadows the themes that would mark his work: decadence, identity questions, transgression and madness ... In this work, the reader wakes up to a gross reality, where the characters expose their bare memories and also the stories of some rancid families in Santiago, locked up in mansions that nurture their darkest obsessions. This novel is a classic in Latin American literature. "The most literary writer of our generation." --Carlos Fuentes

Humberto who lives and works at a convent home for old women loses his sanity as he becomes obsessed with black magic and his duty to protect a monstrous child.