José Donoso

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José Donoso (1981)

José Donoso (born October 5, 1924 in Santiago de Chile , † December 7, 1996 there ; actually José Donoso Yáñez ) was a Chilean writer . He was one of the leading authors of the "boom" in Latin American literature of the 1960s and 1970s. His works, which often criticized the upper class of Chilean society, were marked by complexity and pessimism, which he processed into stories full of dark surrealism and irony.

biography

After studying for three years at the Pedagogical Institute of the Universidad de Chile , Donoso received a two-year scholarship to Princeton University . At this he completed his bachelor's degree in 1951 . During his time at Princeton, he published short stories in English. He then worked as a lecturer in English literature and English at universities in Chile, but also as a journalist.

In 1956 the city of Santiago de Chile awarded him a prize for his first collection of short stories. The following year he published his first novel The Coronation , the English-language translation of which was awarded the William Faulkner Foundation Prize in 1962 . This novel is about the fifty-year-old Andrés, who lives alone in a house with his tyrannical grandmother and fails when he tries to approach the grandmother's young nurse. The grandmother in this plant is modeled after Donoso's own grandmother, who moved into his parents' house in the early 1930s.

In 1958 Donoso traveled to Buenos Aires , where he came into contact with important Argentine writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and met his future wife. He left Chile in 1964 and did not return for seventeen years. During this time he lived mainly in Spain, but also in the United States. During these years he wrote his most famous novels. He chose a transvestite in a village brothel as the protagonist for his novel Places Without Borders , published in 1965, which has fewer and fewer customers and thus plunges the main character into ever greater misery. This work was filmed in 1978 by Arturo Ripstein . The obscene Bird of the Night from 1970 is about a failed writer amid a nightmarish atmosphere. In Das Landhaus , published in 1978, a child from a middle-class family befriends Indians , which his family strongly disapproves of.

In 1986 the author wrote, Die Toteninsel, a critical novel about life in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet . In 1990 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile , the highest award for literature in Chile.

Donoso died of liver cancer in 1996 at the age of 72 after a two-year illness . He had worked until the end and shortly before his death he had finished the novel El mocho , which was published posthumously.

In 2010 his adopted daughter Pilar Donoso (1967-2011) published a biography about her father and his family with the title Correr el tupido velo (in German: to draw the dense veil).

Works

  • Verano y otros cuentos (short stories), 1955
  • Coronación (novel), 1957, German The Coronation , 1980
  • El charleston (short stories), 1960
  • El lugar sin límites (novel), 1965, German place without borders , 1976
  • Este domingo (novel), 1966
  • El obsceno pájaro de la noche (novel), 1970, German The obscene bird of the night , 1975
  • Historia personal del boom (essay), 1972
  • Tres novelitas burguesas (novel), 1973
  • Casa de campo (Roman), 1978, German Das Landhaus , 1986
  • La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria (novel), 1980, German The Marquesita , 1991
  • El jardín de al lado (novel), 1981
  • Poemas de un novelista (Poetry), 1981
  • Cuatro para Delfina (novel), 1982
  • La desesperanza (novel), 1986, German Die Toteninsel , 1987
  • Taratura y naturaleza muerta con cachimba (novel), 1989
  • Donde van a morir los elefantes (novel), 1995
  • Conjeturas sobre la memoria de mi tribu (Memoirs), 1996
  • Nueve novelas breves (novel), 1997
  • El mocho (novel), 1997

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry on José Donoso in the Columbia Encyclopedia (English)
  2. ↑ a b Article on José Donoso at eNotes.com (English)
  3. ↑ Obituary. In: Latin America News , issue 271, January 1997
  4. ↑ On the death of José Donoso at the University of Northern Colorado ( Memento from December 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Donoso, José
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Donoso Yáñez, José (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Chile
DATE OF DEATH December 7, 1996
Place of death Santiago de Chile