But the biological metaphor is misleading: it is less the cell itself than its DNA that tells us about the person of which it is a part, and it tells us little if anything about that person’s history. Likewise, then, in her introduction to El lugar sin límites (translated into English as Hell Has No Limits), Selena Millares argues that Donoso is “a man of houses” and that “the house encapsulates and represents an entire society and the history that underpins it, just like a cell speaks of the human organism to which it belongs” (74). Perhaps it’s the obsession with houses: Casa de campo ( A House in the Country), for instance, as (in Monika Kaup’s words) “an allegorical novel about Latin American history and culture in general and Chile’s national trauma in particular” (“Postdictatorsahip Allegory and Neobaroque Disillusionment” 92). For some reason, José Donoso’s work seems particularly susceptible to a reading as national allegory.
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