Imaginative Enchantments

By Paul Gray

A HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY by Jose Donoso; Knopf; 352 pages; $16.95

With The Obscene Bird of Night (1973), his fourth book, Chilean Author Jose Donoso joined the front ranks of South American fabulists. His sprawling novel not only housed more grotesques than a whole rack of Gothic thrillers; it also offered a narrator who pretended to be a deaf-mute, baroque retellings of native legends and a riot of inventiveness. Donoso was inevitably mentioned in the same breath with Borges and Marquez as yet another prophetic surrealist bent on reimagining his colorful, tragic continent.

A House in the Country proves, first of all, that success has not 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.

A small army of servants waits on the whims of the family. When a new husband of a Ventura bride wonders aloud why he sees the same lackey in crimson livery standing in the same spot every day, he is asked in return: "Don't you agree that a touch of red is 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."

Suspicions that the Venturas are meant to stand, in exaggerated poses, for some of the more garish South American oligarchies are inescapable, and Donoso does nothing to discourage them. But he also ducks any implied accusations of realism. After setting and populating his scene in the first chapter, the author takes pains to point out that his creations are impalpable figures of fancy. He asks his readers to "accept what I write as an artifice. By intruding myself from time to time on the story I simply wish to remind the reader of his distance from the material of this novel, which I would like to claim as something entirely my own, for exhibit or display, never offered for the reader to confuse with his own experience . . . The synthesis produced by reading this novel--I allude to that ground where I allow the imagination of reader and writer to merge--must never be the simulation of any real ground."

Even if this stance is ironic, it leaves readers with hardly any place to stand. Events in A House in the Country are not only bizarre but vertiginous, a maelstrom around negation. Suppose, the novel demands, that one summer the elder Venturas decide to spend a day away from their estate at a picnic site that may or may not exist. They take all their servants and weapons with them (cannibals are said to maraud in the wilds, although no living family member can testify to having seen one), leaving their 33 pampered children alone and unprotected in the huge house.

Suddenly, the young people's games, rivalries and sexual experimentations assume the edge of urgency. Many of them 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.

Invaders appear, or seem to: cannibals, neighboring peasants, armed servants intent on recapturing the house for their masters, 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 to her.

Donoso's magic is munificent but chilly; he aims to beguile the senses rather than engage them. Near the end, he closes up shop: "The curtain must now fall and the lights come up; my characters will take off their masks, I will pull down the sets, put away the props." Few will regret attending this dazzling performance; some may wish that they had been allowed to care more about the play. --By Paul Gray

EXCERPT

"Here lay the quarters for the servants. . . Back in one corner, a melancholy boy from the south strummed a broken mandolin found in one of the garrets, weaving the futile passions of his country ballads. It was in these parts, too, that the mushrooms were grown, pale and fat as frog bellies, whose caretaker, after a short time shut up underground, turned as cold, as silent, as blind as those delicious fungi the masters were so fond of. One had only to venture a short distance, lamp in hand, beyond where last year's straw ticks lay rotting, to come across other networks of honeycomb cells, where the new servants, hanging up their shining liveries, their boots or aprons, after the day's work was over, resumed their semblance of private lives, soon aborted by fatigue and despair. . . But none of the Venturas ever went down to the cellars."