Lagartija sin cola. (Tailless Lizard)
Reviewed by Bruce Jensen, South Texas Coll. Lib., McAllen, TX -- Críticas, 1/15/2008
Donoso, José.
Chile/U.S.: Alfaguara: Santillana. 2007. 228p. ISBN 978-956-239-532-8. pap. $19.99. FICTION
A giant of the Boom period in Latin American fiction, Donoso is surely the best-known Chilean novelist aside from Isabel Allende. His work continues to fascinate postmodern scholars 11 years after his death. This new novel, resuscitated from a manuscript that Donoso abandoned in the early 1970s, rings true and timely today with its challenging themes: the costs of artistic integrity in a climate of rank commercialism, the heart-rending risks of valuing a place’s beauty and history over its potential for exploitation through development, and the pain of sexual and familial relations that deviate from conventional norms. The narrator is a tortured Spanish artist who ended his own career by dramatically and very publicly renouncing his affiliation with a fashionable school of painters whose market-oriented superficiality he condemned. He takes uneasy refuge in the Catalan countryside, in a town whose stately grandeur he hopes to protect, and is tragically steamrolled. The suspicions of the townspeople, the complexity of his family, and the locals’ thirst for progress at any price prove to be irresistible forces. Lagartija’s unfinished text was among the papers Donoso turned over to Princeton’s Firestone Library to seed its outstanding Latin American collection (and, the story goes, to make good on an unpaid student loan). The novel was adroitly prepared for publication by Julio Ortega, the important Peruvian literary scholar whom Carlos Fuentes, nearly 30 years ago, called one of “the few great critics in Latin America.” Recommended for all libraries and bookstores.
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