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The Obscene Bird of Night is a world seen through a prism of madness… The Obscene Bird of Night is magic realism and beyond… It is magic realism on the Gothic side. It was a sealed world, stifling, like living inside a sack and trying to bite through the burlap to get out or let in the air and find out if your destiny lies outside or inside or somewhere else, to drink in some fresh air not confined by your obsessions, to see where you began to be yourself and stopped being others… Some societies are wide open… And some societies are hermetic…

It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole." It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. His masterpiece is the fabulously entitled The Obscene Bird of Night. "I'm no expert on the topic of South American literature (in fact I'm a dunce), but I have reason to believe (after diligently scouring the internet) that Chile's Jose Donoso, while a very highly regarded author on home turf, is little known on this side of the Atlantic. Seriously, it’s a novel about the last member of an aristocratic family, a monstrous mutant, who is surrounded by other freaks so as to not feel out of place. invested with a vibrant, almost tangible reality.Īlthough many of the other “boom” writers may have received more attention-especially Fuentes and Vargas Llosa-Donoso and his masterpiece may be the most lasting, visionary, strangest of the books from this time period. Its luxuriance, fecundity, horror, and energy will not soon fade from the reader’s mind. The story of the last member of the aristocratic Azcoitia family, a monstrous mutation protected from the knowledge of his deformity by being surrounded with other freaks as companions, The Obscene Bird of Night is a triumph of imaginative, visionary writing. This haunting jungle of a novel has been hailed as “a masterpiece” by Luis Buñuel and “one of the great novels not only of Spanish America, but of our time” by Carlos Fuentes.