El lugar sin limites / Hell Has No Limits

Una novela intensa sobre los limites inciertos de la identidad, con el sello de uno de los grandes novelistas chilenos del siglo XX

Juego implicito con la ambiguedad de los sexos, esta
novela breve e intensa de 1966, que
Jose Donoso consideraba la mas acabada de las

suyas, transcurre en un prostibulo de pueblo, especie de infierno anodino donde confluyen las pasiones
eroticas y los sordidos juegos de

poder que suelen marcar los territorios degradados. La conflitiva historia de la Manuela, el homosexual travestido
que regenta el burdel, va desvelando
los secretos que se ocultan detras de las apariencias, al tiempo que expone a
una sociedad sumida en la decadencia y la incertidumbre.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

With its stark atmosphere, powerful characterizations, and dazzling
alterations of perspective in time and gender, Jose Donoso’s early
masterwork, Hell Has No Limits,
anticipates the qualities of better-known works of this Chilean magic-realist
such as The Obscene Bird of Night.

Originally published in 1966, this grimly vivid novel evokes the sweetness
and despair during one fateful day in the collective existence of Estacion El
Olivo, a decayed community marked for doom as surely as Donoso’s central
character, the transvestite dancer/prostitute la Manuela, whose virginal
daughter operates the brothel out of which she/he works.

La Manuela is menaced both by his would-be protector, the local
politician/land baron who wants to raze Estacion El Olivo for his expanding
vineyards, and by a coldly vengeful trucker, nursing a lifetime of hurts,
deprivation, and suppressed sexual ambiguity. The lives of this trio - past
and present - are indelibly forged in the novel’s stunning climax, which
combines a shocking act of violence in the present with a bizarre erotic
encounter from decades before.