El Mocho.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

By Jose Donoso. Santiago, Chile: Alfaguara (Aguilar Chilena de Ediciones), 1997.

Jose Donoso's posthumous novel, El Mocho, is a game of optics. Characters slip into and out of focus as the author changes perspective, zeroing in first on one detail, then on another, blurring the image with allusions to not-yet-explained occurrences, panning the scene to take in multitudinous details. Significantly, El Mocho, the novel's title character, sees the world through a spyglass that eventually breaks, while his paramour, Bambina, grows progressively blind. Donoso enhances the destabilizing effects of his shifting lens by changing narrative voice without warning, sometimes several times within the same paragraph, or even the same sentence.

El Mocho is set in a Chilean mining town in the Lota area, against a background of political instability. The powerful Urizar family had begun the construction of a palatial complex in the town, only to abandon the enterprise before its completion. Now, of the grandiose project only a park and a pavilion remain. A metaphor for the detached, ruling elite, the Urizars take up residence in Europe, but the profligate youngest son, Blas, returns to Chile, not to reestablish the family's power base, but to schmooze and booze with the miners. Blas soon hooks up with Maria Paine Guala, replacing El Cabo (Corporal) Olea, a local strongman, as her lover. As the madame of a successful dining establishment cum brothel, Maria wields enough influence to have Olea transferred to another zone, although soon he is back wreaking vengeance on Don Blas. Maria had a son with Olea, a boy so insipid that he is known only as El A. With Blas she has a daughter called Canario (Canary) because of the amazing blond hair that proclaim her European ancestry. El A and his Indian wife parent Aristides Olea, who, after his mother's death, is sent to a convent. There he becomes a mocho, a low-ranking religious, whose job it is to perform manual labor. Lacking in faith, ambition, and intellectual curiosity, Aristides shows no interest in ordination; instead, he becomes a sacristan in charge of the beautiful, alluring sacred objects used at Mass--a job he relishes. An aesthete at heart, on a trip home to visit his father he meets Bambina, the proprietress of a traveling circus who views herself as an artist, and abandons the religious life forever. All that remains of his years in the convent is his name: Mocho. Eventually, Bambina suffers a serious...