It is quite interesting that the work of José Donoso … has often been described as traditionalist, traditionalist, that is, in the English sense, admiring as he does James and Austen. There has even been mention of the word costumbrismo, referring to the genre very much dear to nineteenth-century Spanish writers generally considered to be minor—except Larra, of course…. The stories [in El veraneo yotros cuentos] unquestionably give every evidence of a modest and perfectly calculated kind of realistic literary practice. But to see nothing more than this in the stories is to hide their insidious and quite beautifully disguised thematics.

In the title story, for instance, the whole nightmare of marital infidelity is reflected in a perverse and distorted way through the relationships of the various servants of the triangle, and through the way in which the appropriate children manipulate not only each other, but also the servants in turn. The result is a complicated and perfectly executed depiction of intricate human domination, alleviated only when a realm of feeling between the children cuts through the vertical social structures of hate and authority that the adults have created for their children and which they wish to pass on to them.

And so, too, for the language—apparently odd chatter between servants and children and amongst the children themselves, but in reality a linguistic mask for one of Donoso's nuclear fantasies, the alternance and conflict between Life and Authority. (pp. 155-56)

Other stories in the collection, such as "Una señora" and "Fiesta en grande," are superb set pieces that … are expressive of Donoso's essentially urban sensibility. The polarities of "civilized" and ordered existence finally break down, and man is confronted with an overwhelming sense of the violence of nature and man and consciously throws himself into a maelstrom of unconscious, inhuman, and murderous void.

Any discussion of Donoso's thematics must also take into consideration the tone—violently Romantic in spite of everything—which characterizes the evolution of his characters from constriction to expression. (p. 156)

In two later novels, El lugar sin límites and Este domingo, both of 1966, [the] multiple dependence and relationship of class is delineated in a masterful fashion, a portrait of a society in which the etymological meaning of travesty is fully explored, a world where all objects are signs to their opposites, a terrifying confusion of doubleness. But in spite of the confusion of identity purposefully practiced by Donoso in his short stories, one is often left with a unique vision of the central character of the story…. (p. 157)

Against the rigidities of society, there is an ever-present oceanic sense in Donoso into which his heroes plunge. These pathetic and at times comic figures are pilgrims of their own brand of truth, vague searchers for a freer self and society, constantly at odds with the reality of their own spiritual suffocation. A groping for a sense of transcendence, a whole process that inevitably entails the encounter with the monster that is within them, engendered out of the mathematical rigidities with which societies function in apparent order…. [In] a few of the early stories, a good story is robbed of its impact by a too obviously psychological explanation in lieu of an ending. (pp. 157-58)

But certainly our sensibilities are constantly engaged by Donoso's stories—above all, because of the sheer power of the inarticulate that underlies them all. He is always careful to draw for us a miniature portrait of a society, often from the point of view of a childlike narrator who is sensitized to the significance of every detail. What draws us out as readers is the power of the unspoken in him, the deadly attraction of nothingness. It would seem that his work, glanced at in a cursory fashion, does more than its share of the reader's work, because it is so evidently a refraction of a society, but this aspect can only cloud our vision of this wholly contemporaneous literary achievement. The carefully appointed society with which Donoso began to depict in Coronación and in the stories is for us a functioning lie possibly pointing to a truth; the words surround rather than express a reality. If they denote anything, one would have to mention a society that is itself inauthentic and false. (p. 158)