El obsceno pájaro de la noche Reading Order

El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night, 1970) by José Donoso is one of the most formally radical novels in Latin American literature — a baroque nightmare of shifting identities, hallucinations, and monstrous bodies narrated by Humberto Peñaloza, a writer who has become a deaf-mute caretaker in an old women's retreat, and who may be the same person as the narrator of a manuscript he is supposedly writing, or may not be. The novel is set in a Chile that is simultaneously realistic and nightmarish: an aristocratic family's corrupt estate, an orphanage of deformed children, the ruins of a convent, and a world in which the division between the real and the hallucinatory has entirely broken down. Donoso was the Chilean member of the Boom generation — García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Cortázar — but The Obscene Bird of Night is the darkest and most formally extreme of the Boom novels: where García Márquez uses magic to celebrate, and Cortázar uses formal experiment to create wonder, Donoso uses both to explore a world of absolute social degradation, religious corruption, and physical monstrosity. The novel's Chile is the Chile of the Chilean aristocracy in decline — the same world Donoso grew up in — and his treatment of it is grotesque, obsessive, and magnificent. The title comes from a Chilean folk belief: the obscene bird of night is the widower bird (chucao), whose call is an omen of death.