Review: José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night Rises from the Ashes in New Translation

José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is a monument of vulgarity and erudition, perfused by an eerie air of alluring, unsettling ambiguity. An intensely oneiric work, it was originally published in 1970 and is now being released in a new unabridged translation by Megan McDowell for New Directions that constitutes a major literary event. (McDowell revised the Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades translation that was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973, restoring nearly 20 pages of untranslated text.)

Donoso’s novel attempts to give decisive language to the ineffable. It’s the progeny of Borges, its language as technically adroit and stunning as Gabriel García Márquez’s. But instead of lovely, tragic lyricism, Donoso spins wicked sentences, suggesting a corruption of Marquez’s romanticism.

The Obscene Bird of Night is defined by its unexpected swoops into surrealism and litany of exciting developments and imagery. The ridiculous isn’t rendered believable, as Donoso’s prose is governed by the logic of a realm that exists only in the mind of our ever-ruminating, ever-rambling, and quite unreliable narrator, a corporeal enigma of many names and identities who lives in a tumbledown building that seems to function as some sort of combination of orphanage and hospice, housing kids and geriatrics, a place of birth and death and whatever comes after.

This narrator, in his first identity, pimps out a young girl who is, they tell us, not too bright and possibly mentally handicapped, and she has sex with most of the town’s men, who take turns wearing a costume head. (Ambiguity of identity is the order of the day throughout the book.) She calls the carnal relations “yumyum,” and after becoming pregnant, she gestates her spawn in secret. Then, after she gives birth, the women of the orphanage hide the child, a hideous mutant, raising it inside that hermetic place unburdened by the rules of the world outside, with its forlorn corridors and the faces of its statues abraded by time into anonymity.

The novel has the linguistic dexterity of the English language modernists, with a lot of words but never too many, and a cryptic, insoluble surrealism redolent of the Polish cinema of the ’60s and ’70s (think Wojciech Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium, in which a ramshackle house looms in decay like a forgotten idol over the characters), as well as the impassioned political convictions that imbue the works of Donoso’s fellow Latin American Boom scribes.

As with Julio Cortázar’s story “Axolotl,” you aren’t supposed to understand the novel, nor solve it like it’s a puzzle with one right answer. You get caught in the sinuous slipstream of language and luxuriate in the fluid deluge of first-person musings sometimes addressed in second person. Donoso’s sentences are often long but diverse, with little slivers slipped between sinuous, sinister, and silly streams, and his word choices are consistently unexpected.

Our narrator, who gives himself many names, speaks in stream-of-conscious soliloquies redolent of Augusto Roa Bastos’s 1974 dictator novel I, the Supreme. Then, a quarter of the way through The Obscene Bird of Night, we get an unexpected chapter of lyrical, virtuosic third-person prose in italics, a fleeting fragment of poetry that adds to the book’s aura of the unknowable, its grotesque descriptions resonating with ominous insight:

When Jeronimo De Azcoitia finally parted the crib’s curtains to look at his long-awaited offspring, he wanted to kill him then and there; the loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump, its mouth a gaping bestial hole in which palate and nose bared obscene bones and tissues in an incoherent cluster of reddish features, was chaos, disorder a different but worse form of death.

Then, as the narrator tells us stories about other characters, Donoso leans into a simpler, more traditional third-person prose, with the manic first-person confessions and pontifications intruding every so often. As the man expounds loquaciously on this and that, Donoso’s protracted sentences veer and swerve all over the place, but always with a profound forward momentum, with a surfeit of commas and sparse use of other marks of punctuation.

The narrator very clearly thinks that his musings are profound, and every couple of pages actually does offer a beautiful or depressing observation that resonates with a trenchant play of words or a Thomas Bernhard-esque stuttering repetition whenever our raconteur becomes perturbed. Much like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel makes you think about the scars of the spirit, Donoso finds deep, dark, gleeful power in the clarity and opacity of language—to capture not reality but the fleeting and eternal strangeness of human existence.

In the end, the brilliance of The Obscene Bird of Night (and what a title!) is its valiant attempts, which Donoso knows are innately futile, to use language to capture the unnerving quality that makes us and defies articulation. He writes sentences of serpentine syntax largely comprising simple words and familiar phrases that accumulate into mysterious passages about the nebulousness of identity, the Sisyphean attempts to figure out one’s purpose in life.

José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is available on April 23 from New Directions.