This book is not one that you simply read, it is a book you experience. It makes almost no sense at times and can come across as incoherent but I find that this how this story unfolds, dealing in broad brushstrokes of ideas branching and flowing off a central idea. Last time I read it I was in high school, and I was a little unsure if it would still hold up 9 years later. Turns out my fears were unfounded and it has held up phenomenally. I found myself drawing more from the book than I had my first time around. This being my second time reading it, I can safely say that it is still one of my all time favorite books.

The story constantly flows between perspectives, even in a single paragraph it may feel like there are a couple of narrators fighting to rule the page. It turns the story into a challenge for the reader. A book that engages the reader in a way that pushes the limits of narrative coherency. I love the uniqueness of the story and how it tackles so many varying aspects of life without ever setting off to preach a certain worldview. One of the overarching themes of the book was how we gain a sense of self and the nebulous way in which we exist in a world of constantly changing variations.

The imagery the book conjures up brings to life a vividly twisted world in which the old and new are never exactly how they seem. The symbolic nature of many of the characters and objects is one of the reasons I love the story so much. It's a book in which the reader can find what they want to find while also stumbling across hidden treasures. The narrative format is very stream of consciousness, with some paragraphs taking up multiple pages.

I'm glad I got to revisit this book and explore the expansive tale it offers up. It is definitely a challenging and uncomfortable book to read at times, so I can't recommend it to everyone, but if you want a book that is spellbindingly complex, confusing, meaningful, and meaningless, then this is the book for you.

Qué pedazo de libro. Brillante, confuso, tosco, de un lenguaje tremendamente chileno y una construcción de diálogos y personajes brutalmente auténtica. Es que la chilenidad de este libro se desborda por los costados. Es además uno de aquellos libros que, aunque uno trate una y otra vez de aislar un párrafo o frase para citar, no logra conseguirlo: el libro es demasiado bueno, complejo, enmarañado como para aceptar citas.

Curiosamente, este pedazo de literatura de Donoso no parece ser particularmente popular en Chile. Otras de sus obras, como Coronación (un libro terrible, a mi parecer) gozan de mucho más reconocimiento. No puedo más que recomendarlo a cualquiera que haya gozado de libros como Pedro Páramo, Rayuela, o Sobre Héroes y Tumbas. Para mi, El Obsceno Pájaro de la Noche está a la altura de todas estas obras maestras.

'Live? Live? What is that? Why not let our servants do it for us.'

I pity those who would read something like this for purposes of titillation rather than elucidation. Some of them come from Bloom, aka that 'literate' one with a chronic aversion to Latin America among many other components of reality, and thus aren't so much readers as extremely good at following directions. Some of them come from 4chan, a collective whose rather abjectly clownish reputation doesn't stop it from having literary tastes that are surprisingly similar to certain highfalutin types that I used to bump elbows with back when I thought that strongly stating an opinion meant the opinion was strong in and of itself. Neither origin point requires a knowledge of Galeano's [b:Open Veins of Latin America|187149|Open Veins of Latin America Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent|Eduardo Galeano|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413515169l/187149._SY75_.jpg|771351] or Klein's [b:The Shock Doctrine|1237300|The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism|Naomi Klein|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442590618l/1237300._SY75_.jpg|2826418], and while the odd reader might have been fortunate enough to catch wind of Allende or Bolaño or some comparatively more well known denizen who are equally credible in their tales that discuss in one way or another that something is rotten in the state of Chile, that doesn't guarantee much. Purchase this particular edition of mine, and Donoso's long excursion in Europe sounds like a mere academic dalliance rather than a committed political and ethical stance. Look the author up on Wikipedia, and the Spanish version presents the fact that Donoso was not heterosexual, which offers a great deal of interpretive material for at least one of this work's major character relationships (the forever queer question of, do I want to fuck them, or do I want to be them) and goes completely unmentioned by the English version. Mazes and mazes, corridors and corridors, and considering how eager certain popular reviewers are to use slurs in their reviews of this work when none occur in the text itself, I doubt the facts would go over too well. So: who's sewing themselves up now?

The other thing about choosing to get one's kicks off of only what is completely separated from the tenets of context is it makes things so much less interesting. Much as the tortures of the Pinochet dictatorship take place for a mere blink-and-you'll-miss-it length of time in this piece, it takes a certain frame of mind to acknowledge how that blatantly torturous modernity has been fused with historical realities: namely, that of the habits of rich people in feeding on the poor and feeling up amongst themselves. Elizabeth Báthory and Charles II of Spain are, respectively, only some of the more infamous examples and/or consequences of these behaviors, and couple that with the history of pretty much every single Latin American country being little more than a cycle of the overlords on top brutally crushing those on the bottom while outsiders bleed the nation dry, and you have the materials for a tale that isn't exactly cautionary so much as diabolically accurate. It's uncomfortable at times, but considering what the able like are in normal real world circumstances, I'm certain that particular kinds of hoards of readers are just not used to reading about disabled and/or neuroatypical folks in relatively humane terms, and thus can't handle descriptions of nontypical bodies and atypical minds unless they're being continually beaten and lobotomied and terrified into complete and utter passivity. The world's a lot more differentiated than what the mainstream holds itself up as, and apparently the idea that certain kinds of folks won't be condemned simply for being born terrifies the average reader of this kind of literature to an extraordinary degree. Says a lot more about the audience than the performer, no?

In terms of the work itself, there's the whole Cour des Miracles scenario that is reiterated in seemingly every blurb of this, but in reality takes up very little of the actual wordcount. There are the mirror relationships between noble and lackey, lady and servant, in which the torturous tumescence of the same sex relationships are sensuous, metamorphosing, rapacious, grotesque, and lustful in turns, emotional overtones that course their way throughout the entirety of this work. Ultimately, this is the tale of a fall of a dynasty that may or may not have been cursed, and the fates of the once great dame and the once hallowed virgin mother follow that of the long ago girl anchorite who may or may not have suffered enough to be deemed a saint, stripped and shipped and entombed once they had, whether by voluntary action or involuntary existence, had proven themselves to be no longer of worth. The men are also eventually used and abused and expelled out as so much dust and ash, but the thread of this narrative and the fate of the characters is still theirs to control/influence/subvert through the state sanctioned power given to the attributes of money, literacy, or specifically shaped genitals; leastwise, for a time. If one wanted to be fancy about it, one could read into this as the tale of a country that forbids its people from growing so as to more effectively offer their blood, their bones, their fertility, their selves on the open market, leaving little but islands of vast magnificence floating in a sea of decrepitude, which every so often spits out a particularly lovely/useful/robust fish that is coaxed, seduced, and slit down the front, its entrails feeding the blessed while its husk, still breathing, is thrown back into the night. A reading that will be in no way apolitical enough for some, but is more than good enough for me.

I looked up the name of [a:Concha Espina|2993681|Concha Espina|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1514918728p2/2993681.jpg], one of a number of names that this novel characterizes as "authors no one reads anymore", and discovered that she had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on at least three separate occasions. That, I feel, does more to describe the tone, the terroir, the terror of the work than I ever could: the grasping onto memories of past glory that have made their way into the present as little more than disregarded eccentricities that have lost almost all of their substance and even more of their meaning in the eyes of not reality itself, but those in control of what reality is. The sacrifices that are necessary for keeping the state of the world going, save that the sacrifices tend to survive their being sacrificed and insist on moving, breathing, fornicating in physical states that the mainstream citizen couldn't even begin to comprehend, and yet gloriously benefits from nonetheless. This is a novel that is only as "magical realist" as you allow it to be, for it's always easier to be horrified by the seeming individual circumstance than to confront the immense system of propagation. In any case, I'm looking forward to when the fragmented literary biopic that Donoso's daughter put together with extant materials composed by her parents, [b:Correr el tupido velo|10431706|Correr el tupido velo|Pilar Donoso|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421687254l/10431706._SY75_.jpg|15336167] by [a:Pilar Donoso|4638236|Pilar Donoso|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1422157445p2/4638236.jpg], is translated into English. There's a good chance it would bring some of the more grosser aspects of this creative piece down to earth, but there's an equally good chance that such would merely strengthen the work even more. After all, truth is always stranger than fiction, and it's always braver to look into the void and write down the testimony of what one sees, than to look out into the night and completely reject the idea that it wants nothing more than to swallow you whole.

"You baptized me yourself."
"That doesn't mean a thing.["]