Chile 9/11 | HELL HAS NO LIMITS: JOSÉ DONOSO, 100 Years, A Laboratory of Writing

Diarios Centrales. A Season in Hell (Universidad Diego Portales, 2023) is an exploration of the personal and creative life of José Donoso (1924-1996), one of the most impressive Latin American writers of all time and a protagonist of the literary Boom. Edited by Cecilia García-Huidobro, this second volume of Donoso’s diaries covers the period from 1966 to 1980. It gives us access to the creative laboratory that produced some of Donoso’s most important work: Un lugar sin límites (Hell Has No Limits), Casa de campo (A House in the Country), El jardín de al lado (The Garden Next Door), and especially El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night), the book that led him to physical illness and the brink of madness at the same time that it established him as a prominent figure on the literary scene. We experience Donoso’s radical approach to experimentation in writing – and with the form that we call the novel – as well as the desperate, decadent, and grotesque characters that populate a fictional universe characterized by blurred genre, genealogical, and class boundaries. This session of the Chile 9/11 Series celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of this groundbreaking Chilean novelist.

A conversation between Cecilia García-Huidobro (Universidad Diego Portales and editor of Diarios Centrales), Carlos Aguirre (University of Oregon/ PLAS), and Javier Guerrero (Princeton University)

Response by Nora Muñiz (Princeton University)

Lecture and discussion will be in Spanish. This event is open to the public.

This series has been funded by a Magic Grant from the Humanities Council.