JOSE DONOSO
37
mean?" I said. "It's a completely realistic thing. Don't be ridicu–
lous." And we had an argument. And I told my wife, "I'm going to
write this story because I want to write something completely sim–
ple and classical and straightforward, in the shape of an Isak
Dinesen tale." Straight from the shoulder. Ijust will have no truck
with the complication these young Latin American writers get
into. I just refuse to have anything to do with them. I just think I'm
incapable of doing anything as complex as Vargas Llosa does.
Then, of course, things began to pile up and that idea went down
the drain. The novel had all sorts of names. But essentially I had
been planning, that is, I had kept that quotation from William
J ames from the time I first read it and I planned to use it for the
title of another book, of some book. I liked the title. But somehow
I saw that this related completely to it.
Christ:
Isak Dinesen is a writer who interests you?
Donoso:
She interested me at one point. I haven't read more of her,
probably because she doesn't take much more reading. But at one
point she did interest me. I translated one of her books into Span–
ish, her
Last Tales.
I also translated John Dickson Carr's bio–
graphy
The Life oj Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
What else have I trans–
lated? I can't remember all that I've translated and what my wife has
because we've done so much work together in that field, including
Franc;:oise Malet-Joris's
Les Personnages
and Hawthorne's
The Scarlet
Letter.
Christ:
Getting back to revisions, I understand that your novella,
Hell Has No Limits,
was originally a paragraph or so in
The Bird.
Donoso:
Actually,
The Bird
was built not so much by adding as by tak–
ing out. It was built by different strata accumulating. I would
begin to write from the beginning and then at one point I felt that
it wasn't good. And then I got an idea for a different beginning,
which is a completely different world. And I began writing from
the beginning with this new idea for the book and incorporated
what I had already written and went further than that which I'd
written by incorporating. The third strata would be another idea.
I must have had thirty or forty starts, which are all worked into
the final version. But I didn't understand the unit that became
Hell Has No Limits
until I read the galleys. I didn't have the pic–
ture, I didn't even have the meaning of the novel! The meaning of
the novel- if there is a meaning- is right at the end. But this I
didn't realize until I was correcting galleys.
Christ:
In
Triple Cross,
where
Hell Has No Limits
appears along with
