TARATUTA and STILL LIFE WITH PIPE

The work of Donoso—the driest, most finicky, and bookish of the Latin American Boom-generation writers—not only seems like a footnote to the lusher talents of Garc°a M†rquez and Vargas Llosa but often, as here, to be about footnotes itself. The two novellas here have a curatorial or library-ish mood about them. In the first, Taratuta, a writer becomes intrigued (for no discernible reason other than that such intrigue will provide us with this tale) with the appearance in Russian Revolution history of a redheaded terrorist named Taratuta, an intimate of Lenin's who was instrumental in disposing of a dowry that would be used to finance the revolution. The writer by luck finds a descendant of this Taratuta—a young boor who bears his heritage with ignorance and complication both—Donoso's rather tame point being, presumably, that history wants nothing more than to shrug itself off as fast as it can and assume other guises. There's a stab at comedy here- -wild-goose-chasing after what's buried under obscurity, and then discovering new obscurity—which is echoed in the second piece, Still Life With Pipe. A pedantic young man becomes obsessed with a forgotten Chilean painter—only to find that art lives not only in memory but in perpetual reduplication. Juiceless exercises.