Taratuta and Still Life with Pipe: Two Novellas

Jose Donoso, Chile’s most acclaimed writer, is responsible for “some of the best writing from Latin America in recent years” (New York Times Book Review). His edgy surrealism and playful intellect evoke what is most unique and extraordinary in his fiction and that of the other writers of the “boom” generation – Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, and Vargas Llosa. These novellas distill the major concerns of his writing career: the confusion of politics, the indeterminancy of a stable reality, the strangeness of love, and the process of creating and evaluating art. In explaining these works Donoso has written, “It’s like when you hold a comb in a basin of water, we see the comb refracted, real but not real. I’m interested in the angle that reality and its image make in the beholder.” Taratuta is a story about history and about writing. Donoso intermixes fact with fiction, actual quotation with imaginative elaboration. Taratuta is formed from a brief moment in Lenin’s life, concentrating on the people surrounding him, including one Taratuta believed to be a supporter. Yet the narrator can only find conflicting references to this Taratuta. Was he a devotee of Lenin’s or was he working for the other side? Or was he just an egoist with no political affiliation? The narrator puts forth his thoughts on Taratuta in an article. In response, a man of the same name goes forth wondering if he is one of Taratuta’s descendants. He proves a strange link to the past. A waiter in love with an aging psychic, he grew up in poverty with little knowledge of his family. Slipping in and out of the narrator’s life, this Taratuta is a comic and teasing figure, defying the neat boundaries of history and fiction. In StillLife with Pipe, Donoso continues his discussion of the limits of art. He tells the story of Marcos Ruiz Gallardo who trades his obsession for money for an obsession in art. At first interested in the work of a forgotten Chilean painter for monetary reasons, Gallardo slowly turns