Santiago, Chile
It will be fifty years since the publication of Historia personal del Boom (1972) a work that was not only a pause after the enormous creative effort that El obscene pájaro de la noche meant for José Donoso. It is also a testimony to the articulation of his literary self. Because under the premise of reconstructing the literary phenomenon experienced by Latin American narrative in the 1960s, the author constructs his identity as a writer from the margins of that phenomenon. A self-representation shaped by the tension with his contemporaries as much as with the literary patterns of the previous generation. The following pages analyze the first edition as opposed to its 1983 reprint, as well as notes from his personal diaries, in order to make visible the scaffolding of his own autobiography, the autobiography of a reader