Hell Has No Limits

　　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.