Masters fear their own servants
Powerful people depend on those who serve them in their homes, and that dependence breeds fear. The servants see everything and can slip into the most private parts of their masters' lives, even their desires.
At a crumbling, convent-like estate in the Chilean countryside, Humberto Peñaloza—secretary to the powerful aristocrat Jerónimo de Azcoitía—moves among nuns, aging servants, orphans, and a decaying family line locked in spiritual and sexual conflict. José Donoso's landmark antinovel dissolves plot and identity into something stranger and more hallucinatory.
Hiding a defect needs a false world
To keep someone from learning what they really are, you must build a whole world around them in which their condition looks normal. The shelter becomes a mirror image, a photographic negative, of the real world outside.
Cruelty spreads through whole communities
The capacity for monstrosity, vengeance and cruelty is not a private flaw of a few people. It is a shared inheritance, passed through individuals, families, societies and countries alike, and it grows worse as the bonds between person and community break down.
Power reshapes who you are
The line between master and servant, rich and poor, self and other is not fixed. Living on either side of it can warp a person's identity until it splinters into many shifting selves.
Basking in envy invites danger
Enjoying other people's envy is playing with fire. Envy stirs up dark forces, and those forces eventually turn on the person who courted it.