El obsceno pájaro de la noche Reading Order

El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night, 1970) by José Donoso is the great Chilean Boom novel — perhaps the most formally terrifying novel of the Latin American Boom, a work in which identity, reality, and narrative itself dissolve in a labyrinth of mutating voices, shapeshifting characters, and a logic that follows dream rather than reason. The Humberto Peñaloza who begins the novel as the secretary to the aristocrat Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía slowly disappears into his narration, becoming the mute Mudito (little mute), a servant in a house full of ancient female witches; he is also, simultaneously, Jerónimo's son Boy and the text's omniscient narrator, and he is also the novel itself consuming its own narrator. Donoso spent eleven years writing El obsceno pájaro, suffered a breakdown during its composition, and produced a novel that is simultaneously a critique of Chilean class society, a Gothic nightmare in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Chilean story, and a formal experiment in which consciousness itself becomes unreliable. The novel's central concern is with the refuse of Chilean society: the old women, the deformed, the illegitimate, the servants — all those who are sorted into the Casa de los Ejercicios Espirituales (the old women's home where the novel is largely set) and forgotten. Their world, governed by superstition, ritual, and the logic of the abject, is the novel's true subject.