With its stark atmosphere, powerful characterizations, and dazzling alterations of perspective in time and gender, José Donoso’s early masterwork, Hell Has No Limits, anticipates the qualities of better-known works by this Chilean magic-realist. He called it his best "the most perfect, with fewest errors, the most complete." Originally published in Spanish as El Lugar sin Limites in 1966, this grimly vivid novel evokes the sweetness and despair during one fateful day in the collective existence of Estación El Olivo, a decayed community marked for doom as surely as Donoso’s central character, the transvestite dancer/prostitute la Manuela, whose virginal daughter operates the brothel out of which she/he works. La Manuela is menaced both by his would-be protector, the local politician/land baron who wants to raze Estación El Olivo for his expanding vineyards, and by a coldly vengeful trucker, nursing a lifetime of hurts, deprivation, and suppressed sexual ambiguity. The lives of this trio—past and present—are indelibly forged in the novel’s stunning climax, which combines a shocking act of violence in the present with a bizarre erotic encounter from decades before. Author of A House in the Country, The Obscene Bird of Night, Coronation, This Sunday, Curfew, and numerous other works, Donoso is one of the great Latin American “boom” novelists. He was awarded the international prize of the America Award in 1996, shortly before his death.
Author
From Wikipedia: José Manuel Donoso Yáñez (5 October 1924 – 7 December 1996), known as José Donoso, was a Chilean writer, journalist and professor. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States and Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he said his exile was also a form of protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He returned to Chile in 1981 and lived there until his death. Donoso is the author of a number of short stories and novels, which contributed greatly to the Latin American literary boom. His best known works include the novels Coronación (Coronation), El lugar sin límites (Hell Has No Limits) and El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night). His works deal with a number of themes, including sexuality, the duplicity of identity, psychology, and a sense of dark humor.
