[In the following review, Polk lauds the two novellas Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe. He asserts that Donoso continues to focus on the relationship between an artist and his art, and social realism, in the two works.]

First, a confession: Although I've reviewed all manner of contemporary fiction over the years, I'm still uneasy about using the word "postmodern" in a sentence.

But surely something different is going on in the work of the Chilean novelist José Donoso, perhaps even something that warrants the term. The richly imagined tapestry of The Obscene Bird of Night, his best known novel, is a tight fabric of ambiguity, stitched through with surreal highlights of switched identities and a meandering plot that falls apart and reassembles itself in unexpected places.

A recurring theme in much of Donoso's fiction is the nature of inspiration and the ambivalent relationship between the artist and his art. The Garden Next Door, for instance, describes a novelist first searching for and then mishandling a theme. The supposed creator and his supposed creation keep intersecting at odd junctures until the former is overwhelmed by the latter and the tale is left to be told by an unforeseen third party.

The novelistic process is also central to Taratuta, the first of these impressive short works. While looking through material about pre-revolutionary Russia, the writer-narrator stumbles across Taratuta, a historically obscure comrade of Lenin's.

Perhaps using a pseudonym, the man was mixed up in a plot to transfer a sizable inheritance to revolutionary coffers. Glimpsed through the fog of distant history, the story is a fun house of mirrors and darkened passages that awakens in the narrator "the impenitent spinner of intrigue that's present in all novelists…."

While the incipient fiction percolates, he writes a magazine article about Taratuta's shadowy adventures along with the obscurities and contradictions he has uncovered. Hardly is the piece published when the novel comes to the novelist.

A letter arrives from one Horacio Carlos Taratuta pleading for a history, "a foundation stone on which to build the table of his origins." This modern Taratuta exists in a void, orphaned in Buenos Aires by a father who revealed nothing of his roots before disappearing in the turmoil of Argentina's Dirty War. Now the son is left with only a peculiar name and a few weakly grounded suspicions about where it came from. Suddenly, in the magazine, he sees that name; maybe there's a reality to it after all.

For the narrator, reading the young man's plea places him in the middle of his own fiction. A "writer's arrogance can make him challenge dragons and work miracles," he says, "and the disorientation of that boy condemned to live a story without any beginning moved me."

Soon, however, the disorientation consumes the writer's own plot, and by the end the young man's story becomes the only story, as the historical saga the narrator had once imagined fades into oblivion. He makes one last stab at reasserting control, but fails and the novella meanders toward what appears an end of its own determining.

Taratuta, in fact, often seems independent of any author's voice. This is not true, of course; it is a creation of José Donoso. Yet the issues it raises take us to the extremes of fiction and to questions about the nature of that beast which sound very postmodern after all.

Still Life With Pipe is more conventionally structured, with clear antecedents, particularly in fiction by such Argentine writers as Humberto Costantini and Vlady Kociancich. But one of Donoso's most singular techniques is to apply his own brand of surrealism to themes more common to social realism—class struggle or the deadening life of the bourgeoisie—with unique results.

We are introduced to the pompous bank clerk Marcos Ruiz Gallardo, who very much wants to become part of the cultural elite. Unfortunately, he has no real idea who the elite is or what it does, although he suspects art may be involved.

Imagine his good fortune then, while on a vacation in the faded resort of Cartagena, to stumble across the paintings of Larco, a forgotten Chilean artist. He has never heard of the man, nor, as it happens, have many others. Although Marcos sees little to recommend the work, it is 'art' and thus may lead him to his goal. The obscure clerk quickly becomes an expert on the obscure painter.

He does not make it to the elite, but the attempt allows Donoso some insightful observations about art, society and human nature. By the end, our perceptions of all these things are not quite what they were at the beginning.

These short works, smoothly translated by Gregory Rabassa, show the author at his near best, challenging, provoking, forcing reexamination. Both are complex but intensely readable, told with generous amounts of irony and wit. All of this may or may not be postmodern, but it certainly is striking.