THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT

A newly revised translation of Chilean novelist Donoso’s daring, deeply surreal exploration of self, isolation, and Latin American mysticism, including 20 pages of text that was cut from an earlier edition.

A squiggly but unbroken line runs from Kafka’s Metamorphosis through Camus’ The Stranger to this 1970s cult classic and beyond to modern relations like Mariana Enríquez’s Our Share of Night (2023) and Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio (2023). Set in a haunted nunnery overstuffed with grotesqueries, decaying memories, and nightmares both real and imagined, this labyrinthine novel is confounding to understand even as its disturbing imagery and universal dread linger. Combined with a narrator who is so unreliable that his very identity is an enigma, the fragmented narrative heightens the sense of dread and disorientation. In a decidedly nonlinear fashion, we eventually ferret out that the narrator is Humberto Peñaloza, a writer of little means who’s in over his head. He’s been hired by Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía, a wealthy and influential aristocrat being groomed for political office, to write about his family legacy. By the time the story begins, the future senator is obsessed with producing an heir, which his wife, Inés, cannot. Meanwhile, the narrator has somehow become “Mudito”—a supposedly deaf-mute giant banished to one of the Don Jerónimo family’s dilapidated estates, which is now housing 40 outcast women, five orphans, and three nuns. The whole domestic scene doesn’t get any less weird when one deformed child is introduced and the narrator is ordered to hire a menagerie of “first-class monsters,” educators with similar deformities, to look after the offspring, called only “Boy.” With shades of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Don Jerónimo tries alternately to hide and cure his progeny while Humberto/Mudito becomes deeply entwined in the child’s life. Having either fully captured or utterly dismayed his audience by now, Donoso lets his story disintegrate into a surreal mélange of madness, cryptic rituals, and the proverbial abyss staring back. Your mileage may vary.

A welcome, disturbing reminder of the power of magical realism to distort and reveal by turns.