[In the following review, Updike faults Curfew for "too much sticky, tangled prose," and for failing to fulfill its "Dostoyevskian ambition."]

It is sometimes urged upon American authors that they should write more politically, out of a clearer commitment or engagement or sense of protest. Two foreign novels, one by a Chilean and the other by a Nigerian, demonstrate that having a political subject does not automatically give a novel grandeur, urgency, or coherence. Curfew, by the Chilean José Donoso, takes place in 1985, in a crowded time span of less than twenty-four hours bridging the wake and the funeral of Pablo Neruda's widow, Matilde. The occasion collects a number of varied friends and admirers—Mañungo Vera, a folksinger returned from twelve years in Europe; Judit Torre, a blond, aristocratic revolutionary who looks like the young Virginia Woolf; Fausta Manquileo, a matronly literary figure of distinction; Don Celedonio Villanueva, her husband and a literary figure of perceptibly less distinction; Juan López, called Lopito, a former poet and present drunkard and abrasively obnoxious hanger-on; Lisboa, a Communist Party zealot; Ada Luz, his girlfriend and a docile handmaiden of the late Matilde Neruda; and Federico Fox, a corpulent cousin of Judit Torre's and the only significant character who actively works with the ruling Pinochet regime instead of hating and resisting it.

Pinochet (who is never mentioned in the novel's text) came to power in 1973, in a bloody coup that ousted and killed President Salvador Allende, so by 1985 the dissidents have had time to go into exile and return, to be imprisoned and released, to grow middleaged in their youthful fury and frustration, to lose faith and make ironical accommodations and die of natural causes. Lopito says, "All of us have retired from the political scene, even though we keep telling ourselves that the people united will never be defeated when for more than ten years they've had us more defeated than I can imagine, Mañungo. This is total defeat…. A bomb here, another there, but they don't do anything, like swearing by nonviolent protest or violent protest, or the opposition, or the people united, et cetera. They broke our backs, Mañungo."

Pablo Neruda, the triumphant embodiment of Chilean culture and leftwing conscience, "returned to Chile to die of sadness." Now his widow, Matilde, whom he had nicknamed "La Chascona, the wild woman … because of her tangled mop of hair"—Matilde, who had been "a young, desirable woman of the people, as juicy as a ripe apricot," who "took long, wine-soaked siestas with the poet"—has died in a Houston hospital, after receiving last rites and confiding to Ada Luz that she wants a Mass said at her funeral. The suppression of this request—by Lisboa, because the presence of a revolutionary priest at the graveside would detract from Communist domination of the ceremony—is the main political thread wound around the funeral. The main cultural thread is Federico Fox's acquisition of control over Neruda's valuable papers and letters, in exchange for his removal of bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of establishing a Pablo Neruda Foundation. The main romantic thread is the coming together again of Judit Torre and Mañungo Vera, who had first romanced in their student days. The principal moral event, I suppose, is Mañungo's decision to stay in Chile, with his seven-year-old French-speaking son, after his round-the-clock experience of life under the regime. In his youth, Mañungo was a rock star, a "guerrilla singer … possessed by the potency of his guitar-phallus-machine gun;" his career, pursued since the coup in America and Europe, has been lately bothered by a "softening of his politics" and a chronic tinnitus in his left ear, a subjective sensation of noise that he identifies as "the voice of the old woman"—a certain wheezing sound made by the sea on the coast of Chiloé, his native island—calling him home.

Among these many—too many—threads, the most interesting psychological one traces Judit Torre's peculiar form of political and erotic deadness, induced by a traumatic episode when she was being held for questioning with some other members of her shadowy little group of anti-regime women. Tied and hooded and naked, she hears in her cell the other women being tortured and raped; but her torturer merely tells her in his nasal voice, while he puts his warm moist hand on her knee, to shout as if she were being raped. She remembers:

I waited for his hand to touch me again, my skin waited to be caressed by that viscous, tepid hand that never went further although the nasal voice whispered, Shout more, as if you were enjoying yourself, as if you wanted more, as if I were hurting you but you wanted more, and I shout my lungs out howling like a bitch because I'm reaching a shameful pleasure I'd never felt before, not even with Ramón [her lover, a slain resistance leader]. Shout, shout, he repeated, and I call for help because his whisper threatens me if I don't shout, and I shout with terror at myself, because in this totally unerotic situation I shout my shame at my pleasure while in the other cells my friends are howling like me, but because of tortures different from the torture of being exempted from torture…. I didn't shout because of the tragedy of the other women, I didn't take part in the feast of that majestic collective form, from which the soft hand excluded me in order to satisfy God knows what fantasies, this impotent monster who demanded I shout with greater and greater conviction without knowing that my shouts of terror and pleasure were real.

This moment of feigned torture evidently constitutes Judit's supreme orgasm and forms the novel's most intimate and meaningful vision of the relation between the regime and its enemies. It also warrants revenge. Judit is given a pistol by her women's group and goes forth in the night to find and slay the impotent torturer whose "complex humanity" robbed her of solidarity and unqualified revolutionary purpose: "Sensitive, the bastard with the nasal voice. His sensitivity tore away my right to hatred and revenge." This loss is cause, in the murky atmosphere of contemporary Chile, for murder.

Curfew packs a baggage of Dostoyevskian ambition which its action and conversations do not quite carry. Judit seems not so much tormented as whimsical, in the way of wellborn beauties. The novel in Spanish was titled La Desesperanza (Despair), but the English title refers to a section of the narrative which shows Judit and Mañungo wandering the "green ghetto" of an upper-class Santiago neighborhood during the five hours of curfew, from midnight to five. The curfew, to judge from the number of people they encounter and noisy incidents that take place, isn't very effectively enforced. With her feminist pistol Judit shoots not her impotent torturer/savior but a skylight and a little white bitch in heat who has attracted a disgusting crowd of nocturnal dogs. This eerie section, called "Night," in which the hiding, sometimes sleeping couple haunt the empty streets and merge with the vegetation, is the one effortlessly magical passage of the novel. The hard-breathing prose evokes a dreamlike atmosphere: "On the sidewalk, in their pale clothes, their arms around each other, hidden by plants that were so strong they looked carnivorous, Judit and Mañungo resembled inhabitants of a strange universe which barely needed the flow of love and sleep." Latin-American writers have a way of seeing their major cities as desolate and powerful, as wastelands of a natural grandeur—one thinks especially of Borges' Buenos Aires but also of Vargas Llosa's Lima, Cabrera Infante's pre-Castro Havana, and the Buenos Aires meticulously traversed in Humberto Costantini's "The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis." Donoso here does something like that for Santiago.

Elsewhere, however, his will to significance generates too much sticky, tangled prose. "The only sure way to eliminate his demons was to eliminate himself, to drown in the slow green waters of the Cipresales River that mirrored the vertigo of the air tangled with the vines of madness; waters in which the tops of the oaks and elms sank, and out of whose lazy current emerged trunks of tortured pewter, bearded with moss and covered with a cancer of lichens and fungus." Just across the gutter of the book, a shorter sentence also numbs the mind: "Five years ago, Bellavista seemed immersed in the anachronistic anorexia of oblivion." The translator, perhaps, should share the blame for such heavy-handed conjurations as "Sartre, with whose words he had fertilized the Chiloó dirt from which he'd sprung" and "She gave him only the scrap of her body, which she did not succeed in relating to herself, leaving Mañungo outside the tangle of her feminine failure." Donoso's touch has lost lightness and impudent ease since The Obscene Bird of Night, written during the democratic rule of Eduardo Frei and published in 1970, the year Allende took power. In Curfew, the dominant metaphor—a mythical "'ship of art,' the Caleuche, which was manned by a crew of wizards"—fails to float. The symbols in the background of the book—Carlitos, the toothless lion in the Santiago zoo; Schumann and his attempted suicide in the Rhine; the floods and fogs and witchcraft of Chiloó—have more life than the foreground. The links between history and the novel's character disorders seem forced: "Nadja [Mañungo's former lover]'s coldness was gratuitous, an aesthetic, an experiment with her own limits and the limits of others, while in Judit it was a vertiginous destiny that someone else, or perhaps history, had established." Woolflike Judit and Mañungo with his "rabbitlike smile" are rather pale and wispy posters to be blazoned with such portentous words as "the incarnation of the despair the current state of affairs was pushing them to" and "lives with no meaning more complex than the simplifications wrought by obsession." Most unfortunately, the novel's climax of political violence befalls a character, Lopito, so repulsive, verbose, adhesive, and tiresomely self-destructive that the reader is sneakily grateful when the police do him in. The surge of indignation and sympathy that the text indicates should greet his demise does not come. Lopito makes a poor martyr.

Jacobo Timerman wrote in these pages seven months ago, in whole-hearted praise of Curfew, that in it Donoso "reveals that even those who fight against the dictatorship may be cowards and antiheroes. Most important of all, he shows that not everything in Chile is clear—there is also confusion and despair…. No individual act of political protest is more telling than the sad lives that Chileans are forced to lead." Perhaps in Spanish the novel is more persuasive, less wordy and diffuse and slack, than in English; but in any translation the unhappy revolutionaries must quarrel and drink and seethe and drone in a political vacuum. Donoso, who returned to Chile in 1981 after an absence of eighteen years, generously credits the personnel of the regime with "human complexity," and perceives that the anti-regime forces can sink into "a hatred of all for all." In his exposition, however, the regime has little face and less philosophy, and those who oppose it have no dream or memory of good government. How things came to this claustrophobic pass is not explained, nor is a way out indicated. What human virtue we see resides in the oldest characters, the two venerable writers, Fausta and Don Celedonio, survivors from a more gracious time; in the last chapter, they are taking care of the novel's children, since nobody else will.