The title of José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night comes from a letter Henry James Sr. wrote to his sons Henry and William:
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
This beautiful, baroque, vaguely terrifying passage offers an oblique map of the novel’s conceptual territory. As Donoso expands and explodes the legend of the imbunche—a Chilean folkloric monster—the dissolving figure of the protagonist, writer manqué Humberto Peñaloza, unleashes a phantasmagoric overlap of scenes, memories, fantasies, and dreams.
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