The Garden Next Door by Jose Donoso

I feel compelled to write a review of this book even though I don't think I can do it justice. The end of the book takes a very surprising turn--it changes narrator--and I don't know if I can explain what happens without betraying the importance of such a structural change.

The story concerns a writer who has taken refuge in Spain. He is a political enemy of the Pinochet regime, and as such, he fashions himself as an emigre writer whose prose exude anger and shame for the defeat of the left by the dictatorship. He and his wife take up in a friends Madrid apartment during one summer in the early eighties. The writer revises his already-once- rejected novel. He falls in with decadent people, suffers through his stale marriage, and complains that the generation of children of Latin American emigres have completely lost touch with their native culture and the political problems of their native homes; they are nearly suffused in the European milieu. He hangs around with a young, decadent Rimbaud-like boy who is having an affair with his wife's friend. He attempts to appease the celebrity literary critic, who holds the fate of all novels written by exiled Latin Americans. Eventually, he is confronted with his mother's death in Chile and the unfortunate business decisions that follow. The young Rimbaud steals from the apartment. The revised novel is rejected by three publishers, and he goes off on an uncertain trek to Morocco.

The change of narrator show the problems that the writer has. The world of the political exile has become passe, there is a need for a new batch of writers who examine personal problems rather than harp on the past. The milieu in which he writes is revealed, furthermore, as a source of his marital strife. I wish I could be more detailed.