Ronald Christ
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOSE DONOSO
Ronald Chn·st:
Is it true that the first things you wrote were short
stories in English when you were very young?
Jose Donoso:
I wasn't that young. I was twenty-five and I was at
Princeton. I'd seen a bit of the world but I had never really gotten
down to writing anything. As a child I had written, but not seri–
ously ; I'd written bits and pieces. I always knew that I was going
to be a writer, and I told everybody that I was in fact a writer
-without having written anything. I read voraciously. I kept vo–
luminous diaries . I did all sorts of things, especially with a view to
becoming a writer, but I had never actually finished anything. I
think the change came about because I knew that here in Prince–
ton those short stories were really going to be published. We had
invented a little magazine called
mss.
It was the
avant-garde
coun–
terpart of the
Nassau Lit
and we sort of snubbed the
Nassau Lit
as
being too conservative . We had decided to publish our little mag–
azine and we went around gathering money for it and finally we
did get a few hundred dollars together and we did publish it. But
knowing that there was a magazine ready to publish my things
made me want to write and to publish. So my debut was in Eng–
lish . . . except for small, let's say, articles before that in some
magazines . Very run-of-the-mill journalism.
Christ:
Were those stories like your works that we know now?
Donoso:
One of them is quite a lot like the works you know. It's called
"Poisoned Pastries.» The center of it is a small boy, the family , the
old house, the relation to the sister, the appearance of the mythi–
cal old woman - of
the
mythical old woman belonging to another
class which appears in all my work. She makes her appearance in
this absolutely first short story .
Christ:
You speak of these elements as if they're part of a familiar in–
ventory.
Donoso:
This is something I've been able to see afterwards , from the
vantage point of today. There are certain elements in my work
that have been repeated . In other words , I've wanted to repeat
