The Obscene Bird of Night

There are few novels that one senses more than they read, and "The Obscene Bird of Night", by Jose Donoso, is one of them. Mr. Donoso, who passed away in 1996, was a novelist, journalist, and professor, and his style reflects all three vocations. He writes from the perspective of a deformed mute who does not so much tell a story as let the story be told by those who surround him. In long, scattered paragraphs, sometimes four, five voices will speak, and we know that the mute is in the room as he will sometimes interject with his thoughts. I have seen this before in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano", but Donoso is challenging the reader even more by asking us to listen as the other characters--nuns, priests, inmates, old women, lovers, doctors--speak to the boy, and to each other, and as the boy speaks to them (though they cannot hear him), and narrates the action of the scene. We sense the entire scene that Mr. Donoso has imagined, and in this case, the word creates the frenetic feeling of being stuck in a crowd.

The boy comes from a wealthy family, however, because he is born deformed, the Don of the family manages to surround his son with other freaks in a Casa run by nuns, so as not to expose himself and his aristocratic family to ridicule. The boy, Mudito, is not allowed to leave the Casa and so has no knowledge of the outside world. The story moves through history and time the way our memory sometimes recalls a moment from yesterday and then another from twenty years ago while walking a single city block. The boy has created a character who assists the father in these plans, and through a short novel within this novel, we learn about the development of the Casa. Characters in Mudito's novel and Donoso's reflect each other, and sometimes become each other in the nightmarish world that develops in the boy's mind once he has his first glimpse of the city streets outside the Casa.

Ideas of hoarding objects play a significant role in the novel, and both religious and personal artifacts--a Eucharist light, the finger of Saint Gabriel, a button, a board game--are treasured equally by the "inmates", who have, since Mudito's birth, become accustomed to the Casa, which, as the novel progresses, is rumored to be torn down so that developers can build and profit off the land.

Sex, Dogs, Pumpkins and Giant Paper Mache Heads, also permeate this novel that, in my reading of it, asks whether it is ever possible to erase the now proven corruption of our past, and if those who were responsible for its creation can ever be punished.