The life and work of Jose Donoso They have been the subject of scrutiny since the opening of his diaries at Princeton University in 2008, fifteen years after his death. Part of them were commented on in a kind of autobiographical texts by his adopted daughter. Pilar Donoso in Remove the thick veil (2009), who two years later would take his own life. The book also includes fragments of his mother’s diaries and reveals the father’s veiled homosexuality, the mother’s alcoholism and the self-destructive coexistence between the three, but at the same time the unrestricted support that Maria del Pilar Serrano He gave Donoso so that he could dedicate himself completely to writing, with the moments of anguish that this caused within the family.
Recently, Cecilia García-Huidobro has compiled two volumes with a selection of his early diaries (2016) and Central newspapers (2024), published by the Diego Portales University (UDP). But the big news is the book Correspondencewith unpublished letters between Donoso and Carlos Fuentesgiving an account of a relationship that began in 1962 and continued until the Chilean’s death in 1996. Alfaguara published a few weeks ago in Chile the 364-page volume (available in Mexico) also edited by García-Huidobro together with Augusto Wong.
With the authors of boomDonoso wrote to, visited and met at cultural events. He had a love-hate relationship with them, because one of Donoso’s characteristics, in addition to his talent, was his propensity for envy. One of the writers who attended his literary workshop in Chile says that, during García Márquez’s visit to this country in 1990, Donoso had organized an agape at his house, but the same day he went to hide at a friend’s farm and everything it had to be cancelled.
This year, the UDP published Central newspapers. A Season in Hell. 1966-1980volume edited by Cecilia García-Huidobro. The diaries begin with Donoso living in the United States, where he worked teaching in the prestigious creative literature program at the University of Iowa. Most of it corresponds to his life in Spain (Mallorca, Barcelona, Calaceite and Madrid). In its pages he criticizes Mario Vargas Llosa for his role in boom: “I don’t like. His alleged officialdom, ambassador of boom before him boomits total lack of imagination, its total lack of freedom.”
Cecilia García-Huidobro worked with Donoso in editing the book Items of uncertain need (Alfaguara, 1998), a compilation of his journalistic publications. The editor’s next project is to publish the third collection of the author’s diaries, from 1980 to the last stage of his life.
Donoso corresponded with great writers of his time: Reinaldo Arenas, César Aira, Pablo Neruda, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. However, his relationship with the latter was very close, as evidenced by recently published letters. They saw little of each other, but they considered themselves great friends. Donoso assigned his Mexican colleague a very important role in his book Personal history of the boom. They met at The Grange School, an establishment for children of wealthy families in Santiago. They met again in Chile, in January 1962, at the Concepción Writers’ Meeting. From then on they would establish a friendship that is evident in the correspondence published by Alfaguara, in which he records 33 years of letters that until now remained unpublished. Fuentes recommends it to translators and publishers and at the same time vents about the future of Mexico. Thus, in November of the height of 1968, he wrote to him from Paris:
Mexico is hell and fear. There is an editorial every day calling me a destroyer of the nation, a traitor to the country and a miserable expatriate. Rita (Macedo) says that she can no longer leave the house for fear of insults in the street. There is a climate of denunciation, terrorism, and witch hunts, led by Garro and Paz. Elena Garro reported me to the Attorney General’s Office for “instigating rebellion.” Along the way, he denounced Cuevas, Leonora Carrington, the Chayo Castellanos, Villoro, Zea, Flores Olea—he continues and adds five hundred more names. Octavio’s resignation was a bomb. His daughter wrote him an open letter, denouncing him and accusing him of having taught love of dialectical history instead of love of God.
The editors’ note contextualizes that, after the Tlatelolco massacre, in October 1968, Elena Garro and their daughter, Helena Paz Garropublished accusations against Fuentes, Paz and other intellectuals in the press, holding them responsible for what happened.
The slippery Buñuel
On the 100th anniversary of the Chilean novelist, the Diego Portales University has organized a series of activities between October 8 and 9. Talks, an exhibition, a panel of conversations and the inauguration of a plaque near the building that was Donoso’s childhood home, in Barrio República, Avenida Ejercito 661, which houses the Hogar Santa Ana of the Las Rosas Foundation, a residence for people older people in vulnerable situations, as if it were the continuation of his novel The obscene bird of the night, which established him as the author of the boom. One of its passages is set in a demolished house that houses people dedicated to domestic service who, at the end of their useful period, have nowhere to go. Old age was one of José Donoso’s obsessions, as well as the relationships of domestic service based on social inequality.
For 45 years the author of Cottage He kept intimate diaries in which he displayed his obsessions: the books he worked on, his emotional, family and financial problems. The Firestone Library at Princeton University has 29 of these notebooks, along with the largest collection of manuscripts by Latin American authors in the United States. Donoso was the first author to integrate the archive’s collection of contemporary Latin American literature, before García Márquez, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa.
In 2008 I arrived at the Firestone Library to review journals and correspondence. It was an exciting job to find some of the notebooks in which Donoso wrote. The newspapers are full of compromising family affairs and shots against the Chilean and Latin American literary environment. However, those who knew him in person remember a discreet and even shy Donoso. In his notes from 1968 he reveals the writing process, distressing and at times even deranged, of The obscene bird of the night. He feels that he is hitting the nail on the head and that his originality lies in the creation of a world that is totally his own, more original even than that of Fuentes and García Márquez.
In 1970, barely published The bird -as he called it-, received correspondence from his peers with praise. Vargas Llosa writes that he finds the demonic dazzling, he speaks of stylistic fury, of a masterfully organized nightmare. Buñuel, who was interested in making one of his novels into a film, calls it a masterpiece. This is how Donoso writes to Fuentes from Vallvidrera, in December of that year. He has just sent you his masterpiece as a first:
When you read it, and let it be soon, pleasewrite me a long letter telling me what you think. Don’t write anything about the book yet. Only you have it, and I want you to write something important in the newspapers or magazines there when it is in bookstores in Mexico, and tell me who can be pressured to talk about the book, comment on it, and sound trumpets: I am determined. a, since everything else has gone so damn poorly for me, that the book is a success sales, although it is a disgusting book. (…)
Another thing: Buñuel. VERY important point. Two months ago I received a phone call from Madrid from the producers of Tristana, messieurs Época Films, saying that both they and Buñuel were committed to making films The place without limits. That I went immediately to Madrid: you can imagine that I flew. Conversation with the old man. you know what slippery what is it. The fact is that he is enthusiastic, with the film all in his head, I am dying of hope, he is cast and everything, very kind, and says well: I will do it if the censorship approves it. Three weeks of horrible waiting passed, and the censorship finally said no. Fuck. What possibilities would there be, do you think, to encourage him to do it in Mexico? He spends too much time playing with the idea, too much thinking about it, too much of what has been talked about. I delegate it to you so that, when the old man returns to Mexico in January, you can talk about it.
The letter shows the confidence they had to undertake missions of this type in the face of the “slippery” Luis Buñuelespecially Donoso in Fuentes, who was always encouraging and recommending him. I was hoping that Buñuel could film The obscene birdbut everything came to nothing.
Theater and cinema
After living several years in Spain and skipping the first years of the Pinochet dictatorship, Donoso returned to Chile in 1980. His presence contributed to reconfiguring the dispersed literary map. The experience gained between 1965 and 1967, when he taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, allowed him to accept a new challenge. The Academy of Christian Humanism paid him to give a workshop, which he would offer for years in his own home. From there will arise the core of what in the following decade will be known as the new Chilean narrative.
In addition to the plays based on his books, the best known This Sunday and Coronationboth staged by the Chilean theater company Ictus, with which he collaborated, some of his novels were made into films. Of all of them, perhaps the most famous is The place without limits (1978), directed by Arturo Ripstein. The film tells the story of a brothel in a rural town where repressed desires, power and violence come together. It is considered a masterpiece of Latin American cinema and explores sexuality and marginality.
CoronationJosé Donoso’s first novel published in 1957 in which he addresses the decline of the Chilean upper class, has two film versions. The first (1975) was directed by the Mexican Sergio Olhovich. This is how she describes it to Carlos Fuentes from New Hampshire on July 5:
How right you were! I just saw the first ones stills of Coronation and my soul has truly fallen to my feet. Ernestito Alonso, with beaten hair, with silvery gray hair, walking along the Paseo de la Reforma dressed as a knight from Don Porfirio’s time… really depressing. And I don’t know where they got a scene from where girls dressed in what looks like the troupe’s wardrobe for the performance of Manon in a provincial theater, they dance a minuet… I don’t know what all this has to do with Coronation. Patience.
Subsequently, Silvio Caiozzihis dear friend, would perform his own version of Coronationreleased in 2000. With it, Donoso had started in cinema by writing the script for The moon in the mirror (1990). Caiozzi also directed Hookah in 2004, posthumous comedy based on Donoso’s lesser-known novel (Taratuta. Still life with hookah) about the discovery of some forgotten paintings that reveal a brilliant, ignored painter. Among the many audiovisual projects that did not prosper, there is a soap opera for Televisa that failed to materialize.
As José Donoso’s centenary marks, Mexico does not escape the celebrations. At the UNAM Film Library, a series dedicated to his filmography will be programmed, with screenings The place without limits by Arturo Ripstein and Coronation by Silvio Caiozzi.
AQ
