José Donoso's Multiplication of "The Obscene Bird of Night"

I just finished reading what I consider one of the strangest and most fascinating novels I've ever read, José Donoso's "The Obscene Bird of Night." It's hard to describe exactly what the book is about, the back cover blurb says it's the story of the last member of an aristocratic family who is born a monster and locked up in a labyrinth of other monsters so that he never learns what he really is, but at the same time this is only a small part of what are many other interwoven plots in the book. However, what was almost more fascinating than the oftentimes decadent and disturbing content, is the way that Donoso manages of weaving the entire story together, so that each plot seems to reflect or multiply the other plots, making the novel itself the labyrinth that entraps monstrosities.



One of the first techniques I noticed was the use of an unreliable and supernumerary first person narrator. Not only is the narrator potentially lying, insane, or obsessed about what is going on in the plot, making it difficult to believe whether the perspective on the events we are told is true or real, but he also becomes several different people, letting the first person narrative drift into the perspectives of the rest of the novel's characters. The story of the aristocratic monster is framed by the cloistered life of a nunnery, and the plot jumps forward and backwards in time in order to confuse and commingle these events. Donoso also relies heavily on repetition, of words, phrases, events, both the narrator and other characters becoming obsessed with and circling around certain themes from all angles in order to suggest their mirrored nature and importance to the plot. Lastly, and most fascinating, is a technique described on the back of the book as Donoso's ability to "multiply by myth." Early in the story, characters tell a legend about the family that all the rest of the events in the story somehow reflect or reference, whether by repeating the whole, or by stealing small parts from it to suggest the connection of the entire plot back to a mythic archetype.

On the whole this is an impressive literary work, both from the perspective of a reader and a writer. Highly worth checking out for those looking for something different to read this summer.