The Obscene Bird of Night

The convent's old women surround a wealthy family's deformed infant, Boy, with nothing but other deformed and unusual bodies from birth, so that he will never learn he differs from any external standard of normalcy. This warped, tender construction, an entire artificial reality built solely to shield one person from a painful truth, is the novel's central metaphor for what narrative and identity themselves do: protect by imprisoning, comfort by falsifying, so thoroughly that the shelter and the cage become indistinguishable. Donoso fuses this with the Chilote folklore of the imbunche, a figure sewn shut and sealed into helplessness, to give the metaphor a body rather than leaving it abstract.

Humberto Peñaloza, the servant sometimes called Mudito, narrates across a fracturing, multiplying identity that at times speaks as the mute servant, at times as Boy himself, at times as other characters entirely, with the novel declining to certify which voice, if any, represents an objective truth beneath the shifting narration. This isn't confusion for its own sake: identity here is radically unstable rather than fixed, and the convent's population of the elderly, abandoned, and deformed makes social and physical marginality the novel's whole world rather than its exception. Even by the Boom's own standards of formal ambition, this is the tradition pushed all the way to nightmare, difficulty itself functioning as the novel's argument about how ungraspable a self actually is.

It matters that Mudito may not even be genuinely mute at all; his silence, like so much else in the book, is never confirmed as physical fact rather than chosen role or imposed condition, and that ambiguity extends outward to everything else the narration claims about itself. The old women who tend Boy and later tend Mudito occupy a similar double position, simultaneously captors and caregivers, their devotion to protecting the vulnerable indistinguishable from their capacity to entrap them, which is what keeps the novel's central metaphor from ever resolving into simple horror or simple tenderness.

The decaying, labyrinthine convent supplies the Gothic architecture of sealed rooms and doubling; Chilote folklore supplies the imbunche and the witches; a modernist, then near-postmodernist fragmentation of perspective supplies the refusal to stabilize any of it into a single coherent account. Donoso layers these three inheritances rather than choosing between them, which is why the book reads less like a haunted-house novel with regional color than like an entirely new grammar for describing a self that never held together in the first place. Where Donoso's Boom contemporaries tended to use formal daring in service of eventual illumination, however oblique, this novel treats illumination itself as a false promise, using its difficulty to enact the very dissolution of coherent selfhood it describes.