Books: Shadow Play

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SACRED FAMILIES by JOSÉ DONOSO 206 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

CHARLESTON AND OTHER STORIES

by JOSÉ DONOSO 192 pages. Godine. $8.95.

Both translated by ANDRÉE CONRAD

In the 56 years since Yeats announced that "the center cannot hold," the literature of disintegration has hardened like concrete. Hemingway's nada and Fitzgerald's crackup are now preserved in cliché. It takes talent and ingenuity to put a new face on collapse. A touch of satire and the surreal have become requisites.

José Donoso, 53, demonstrated these qualities in such novels as This Sunday and The Obscene Bird of Night (1973). He remains confidently cosmopolitan in his themes and techniques. Chilean by birth, the author was educated at Princeton, spent time as a writer in residence at the University of Iowa and currently lives on the outskirts of Barcelona, the setting for three eerie and witty novellas linked in Sacred Families.

There is nothing sacred or familial about the book's characters. Doctors, architects, models, painters and intellectuals, they inhabit the chic world of urban haute bourgeoisie. Moral conventions and religious convictions have been replaced by easy sex and superficial nostalgia. At a party, two women sing the '40s hit Chattanooga Choo-Choo, while an argument ensues over whether there were three or four Andrews Sisters. Inane chat, vacuous stares, Bauhaus settings and Pucci puppets form a familiar narrative glaze.

But when Donoso starts pulling his fanciful strings, a model named Sylvia is revealed as a sapient dummy whose arms can be popped from their sockets and whose features can be wiped away. To her lover, Anselmo, Sylvia is an ideal of female submissiveness. But Sylvia has a trick up her armless sleeve. A subtle application of vanishing cream causes Anselmo's sex to disappear—just before his return home to his wife.

In Green Atom Number Five the people seem more inanimate than objects. The paintings and furnishings in Roberto and Marta's "perfect" apartment are removed by friends and mysterious visitors. At times, even the apartment is not where it should be. As the orderly, insulated island of good taste drifts off bit by bit, the couple is left naked and savage—the opposite of everything in their carefully arranged lives.

Sylvia returns fully assembled in Gaspard de la Nuit as the mother of a lonely teen-age boy who wanders the streets of Barcelona whistling a complex piece by Ravel. Music is to young Mauricio what fashion is to Sylvia and what the perfect apartment is to Roberto and Marta: a way of erasing the outside world. It is also a way of severing Mauricio from his dull, affluent life. The tale ends with a prince-and-the-pauper twist, when he changes places with an urchin who is his double.

The stories in Charleston are flatter in tone and more realistic. Yet Donoso's themes of youthful magic and distorted middle-aged passions are still evident. Children have the power to enchant and destroy; dogs and cats provide unusual escapes for the trapped and the lonely. Donoso balances lean, graceful prose with a sense of the psychological arabesque. It is a fine combination for modern ghost stories in which the reader may recognize phan toms of himself. R.Z. Sheppard