The secret diaries of Jose Donoso.

• Author: Montesinos, Eliza
• Position: LITERATURE

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Opened to the public for the first time in 2008, the diaries kept for almost a half century by Chilean writer José Donoso reveal the complex personality of one of the protagonists of the Latin American literary boom and the obsessive work behind his masterpiece: El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night).

In the early 1990s, a few years before his death, Donoso travelled by train to Princeton University carrying a suitcase full of his personal notebooks. As a young man he had studied at Princeton. Now, he was returning as one of best known authors of the 1960s literary movement that had catapulted Latin American literature into international recognition. Don Skemer, curator of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of the Princeton Library, was waiting for him at the station. The Chilean novelist was sick and frail by then, but he used the strength he still had to negotiate the sale of his personal diaries. Some pages should never be read, he said, or should not be released for at least 50 years. The library would not accept those terms, however, and finally they agreed that the journals would remain closed to the public for fifteen years--through September 2008.

The Princeton collection of Donoso's personal journals begins with Volume 34. (The others are at the University of Iowa.) The year is 1966 and Donoso is teaching at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is also in the midst of writing El pájaro and the process is depressing him. He is stuck--can't quite find the right structure--though he's clear that a linear narration is not going to work. The story is about an upper-class couple unable to conceive. Finally, they are successful but they produce a child who is grotesquely deformed. They decide to raise him inside a compound and hire other "freaks" to care for him so that he won't realize he is different. At the same time, on the other side of the city, an ex-convent is being used as a shelter for former maids. Donoso writes that some people doubt he will finish the novel but that he is determined.

Years go by, some of them anxious ones, as Donoso searches for the right way to frame the story. 1968 is a significant year in his life. He is living in Spain, wins a Guggenhelm grant, and adopts his daughter Pilar. (He and his wife María del Pilar Serrano were unable to have children.) Towards the end of the year, he is planning a trip to the United States that will have serious...