El Lugar Sin Limites

Rating:
Summary: Lo mejor de Donoso
Review: El Lugar sin limites es una de las mejores historias de José Donoso, en la cual nos narra la vida de varios personajes en decadencia, que vuelan en libertad pero se topan con una realidad que los confronta y los destruye una excelente obra de la literatura Latinoamericana

Rating:
Summary: Una lucha con(tra) los géneros
Review: José Donoso's "El lugar sin límites" drops its reader into Estación El Olivo, a town spiraling towards oblivion in the middle of the vineyards of Middle Chile. Narrated though a series of interior monologues, dialogue, and third-person narration, switching between past and present tense, Donoso's text refuses to "gender" itself: unlike its protagonist la Manuela, the narrative never affixes itself to a single identity. By means of this narrative, Donoso depicts the sad and brutal tale of la Manuela, a transvestite dancer who desperately wishes to affirm her identity as "the great Manuela," raging against the seemingly ineluctable oblivion which awaits him, Manuel González Astica, by remaining in the village. In order to maintain her identity, la Manuela must continually repeat her defining performance, a gypsy dance performed in a tattered and fading percale dress. However, as the town's inhabitants leave for better economic opportunities down the longitudinal highway, la Manuela remains in the brothel with her obstinate and naively hopeful daughter la Japonesita, watching her audience dwindle. Her last chance to perform her dance presents itself in the character of Pancho Vega, a hyper-macho truck driver, who, in a confused rage of homosexual panic, has threatened to rape both la Manuela and la Japonesita. Bleak and beautiful, "El lugar sin límites" exposes the inevitable violence of the procrustean bed of (borrowing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's phrase) "compulsory heterosexuality."