Word: marulanda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...made Donoso cautious. His new novel takes major risks. It does without a strong central character around whom the action can revolve. It offers instead the Ventura family: seven adults and their spouses plus 33 children ranging in age from six to 16. This clan spends every summer at Marulanda, a magnificent, fenced-in estate, with a vast plain outside stretching to the horizon in all directions. Barely visible are the blue mountains beyond, where laborers who are virtual slaves mine the Ventura gold...
...needed just there, a complementary color to focus the green composition, as in a Corot landscape?" The woman who makes this reply is Celeste, the family's ultimate arbiter in matters of aesthetics, interior decoration and fashion. She is blind. Similarly, the renowned four-story library at Marulanda is all veneer, a mass assembly of false fronts: "Behind those thousands of proudly bound spines there existed not a single printed letter...
...believe that the grownups will never return; the sublime irresponsibility of the Venturas toward everything but their own wealth and pleasures seems headed toward apotheosis. Some cousins hide in fear, others plot revolution, while others still, in a frenzy they do not understand, tear up the protective fence around Marulanda, breaking the hermetic seal around their lives...
...although visions of rebellion motivate a few of these as well. Donoso, 59, keeps this panorama of victories and defeats moving through exhaustive permutations in high gear, and the translation from Spanish by David Pritchard and Suzanne Jill Levine proceeds vigorously. Imaginative enchantments pop up everywhere: the ballroom at Marulanda, where the real exits, amid a host of trompe l'oeil imitations, are considered false; the elaborately thwarted arabesque performed by a wife who offers her husband younger women to be rid of him, while he in turn grows ever more grateful and faithful...