La desesperanza

By José Donoso

Book Overview

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 Ma ntilde;ungo Vera, a native son returning after a successful career as a European pop singer. In the zone between documentary-like realism and grotesque absurdity, Jos eacute; Donoso evokes the suffocating atmosphere of a country under dictatorship, and its quietly devastating effect on the actions of those who live there.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802133819
• ISBN13: 9780802133816
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A story of a hectic 24 hours late in Pinochet's dictatorship

I thoroughly enjoyed this book which is set late in Pinochet's dictatorship as democracy was just starting to return to Chile. An exiled pop singer, who has been in Europe so long he is nearly European, returns on a whim bringing his son, a six-year-old who speaks only French. He arrives just in time to learn that his old friend "La Chascona," widow of poet Pablo Neruda, has died. The next 24 hours find him at the wake, hiding in the streets during the curfew all night with his former lover, who has been in the underground all these years, and finally at a climactic scene during the huge funeral. During it all he tries to come back into touch with his origins as a poor boy in the remote, mystical, and unsophisticated island of Chiloe in the south. The action in the book, despite many flashbacks, covers just about 24 hours. The book is very skillfully written and translated and brings the contradictions and conflicts of life in modern Chile a little closer to those of us in the rest of the world.