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A review by screen_memory
The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso
4.0
Holy shit this book was good, but yo, this book made almost NO sense, but therein lies the marvel. This novel demands much of the reader, and it becomes exceedingly difficult to tell if the language is literal or figurative between lines or, hell, even within the same line; characters assume numerous forms, like the narrator/Humberto/Mundito who's an aged, ugly creature, a well-dressed writer, an infant, and one of the aged nuns living in the Casa, a sort of convent where an order of old nuns take care of orphan children.
Reversals and shifts in identity occur by abstract means or arbitrarily; Humberto takes a bullet meant for a politician, Don Jeronimo, and thereby becomes Don Jeronimo which leads to his making love with Jeronimo's wife, Ines, impregnating her, and consequentially negating the actual Jeronimo's potency. But another reversal is told to have happened later in the text: Ines became Peta Ponce, an old ugly nun covered in warts. These reversals result in the birth of an ugly creature who Humberto is tasked with isolating with other freaks and monsters so the child thinks himself normal, but this means that Humberto, of lesser ugliness, becomes the freak and struggles with the resulting alienation and solitude.
The novel is described as a "haunting jungle," but I believe the narrative in certain ways parallels the Casa the major characters inhabit, that labyrinthine structure in which children vanish, whose walls collapse in earthquakes and thunder storms, and in whose somber rooms the aged pass away, and all of these passages are sealed off, hidden away as if they never existed, though they are returned to at various points in the circumbound narrative, each time with varying details and changes in identities which composes a portrait of a much different reality than the one we came to know through earlier passages.
It isn’t clear where Mundito or Humberto came from - his origin stories are many - or from whom he was born - his mothers are multiple - or if he is himself the ugly creature born from his tryst with Ines (who may or may not be the prospective saint, Iris, who may or may not have conceived of the child through immaculate conception), but it was written that he was tasked with writing the false history of the world he was creating to shelter his son (himself?) in. I wonder if this confused and puzzling narrative was not pitiful Mundito’s attempt to mythologize his own origins, or to rewrite the either tragic or terribly plain story of his birth and his and Ines' lives, or to canonize himself in the history of the false, bizarre world he may or may not have created.
Which of the possible realities are true? Perhaps all of them. Which of them false? Perhaps all of them. But therein lies the joy: The world and its false mythologies are new to us. We are able to enjoy a world without bias, with our conceptions of what is false and true exploded, and our expectations obliterated. Simply put, we are free to encounter the world in all of its fantastical novelty. Magical realism without its primary constitutuent leaves us with nothing but realism, a realm of diminished possibilities we all know well enough, which we have suffered and endured for long enough; a world which cannot rival a world lush with or haunted by the fantastic. No answers are given in the text, but that is all for the best since that which becomes known loses its magic, and so the world loses much of its marvel since that which is marvelous is that which can only be seen in partial form by spark or flicker of intuition but whose full-bodied figure remains relegated to the shadows, unilluminated by the light of understanding.
Reversals and shifts in identity occur by abstract means or arbitrarily; Humberto takes a bullet meant for a politician, Don Jeronimo, and thereby becomes Don Jeronimo which leads to his making love with Jeronimo's wife, Ines, impregnating her, and consequentially negating the actual Jeronimo's potency. But another reversal is told to have happened later in the text: Ines became Peta Ponce, an old ugly nun covered in warts. These reversals result in the birth of an ugly creature who Humberto is tasked with isolating with other freaks and monsters so the child thinks himself normal, but this means that Humberto, of lesser ugliness, becomes the freak and struggles with the resulting alienation and solitude.
The novel is described as a "haunting jungle," but I believe the narrative in certain ways parallels the Casa the major characters inhabit, that labyrinthine structure in which children vanish, whose walls collapse in earthquakes and thunder storms, and in whose somber rooms the aged pass away, and all of these passages are sealed off, hidden away as if they never existed, though they are returned to at various points in the circumbound narrative, each time with varying details and changes in identities which composes a portrait of a much different reality than the one we came to know through earlier passages.
It isn’t clear where Mundito or Humberto came from - his origin stories are many - or from whom he was born - his mothers are multiple - or if he is himself the ugly creature born from his tryst with Ines (who may or may not be the prospective saint, Iris, who may or may not have conceived of the child through immaculate conception), but it was written that he was tasked with writing the false history of the world he was creating to shelter his son (himself?) in. I wonder if this confused and puzzling narrative was not pitiful Mundito’s attempt to mythologize his own origins, or to rewrite the either tragic or terribly plain story of his birth and his and Ines' lives, or to canonize himself in the history of the false, bizarre world he may or may not have created.
Which of the possible realities are true? Perhaps all of them. Which of them false? Perhaps all of them. But therein lies the joy: The world and its false mythologies are new to us. We are able to enjoy a world without bias, with our conceptions of what is false and true exploded, and our expectations obliterated. Simply put, we are free to encounter the world in all of its fantastical novelty. Magical realism without its primary constitutuent leaves us with nothing but realism, a realm of diminished possibilities we all know well enough, which we have suffered and endured for long enough; a world which cannot rival a world lush with or haunted by the fantastic. No answers are given in the text, but that is all for the best since that which becomes known loses its magic, and so the world loses much of its marvel since that which is marvelous is that which can only be seen in partial form by spark or flicker of intuition but whose full-bodied figure remains relegated to the shadows, unilluminated by the light of understanding.