One of the great Boom writers, José Donoso (1924–1996) wrote
novels, novellas, short stories, and poetry. He worked stints as a
shepherd in Patagonia and a stevedore in Buenos Aires before
studying at Princeton and teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He
was twice a Guggenheim Fellow and won the William Faulkner
Foundation Prize as well as Chile’s highest literary honor, the
National Literature Prize, among many other awards.
Leonard Mades (1918–2017) taught comparative literature, French and
Spanish at Hunter College, from which he retired as Professor
Emeritus. The winner of a PEN International Prize for Translation,
in the 1950s he worked for CARE in El Salvador, Haiti, and Bolivia.
Megan McDowell has won the English PEN award, the Premio
Valle-Inclán, and a 2020 Award in Literature from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters; she also has been nominated four times
for the International Booker Prize. She won the 2022 National
Book Award in translation alongside Samanta Schweblin
for Seven Empty Houses. Hardie St. Martin was born in 1924 in
Belize. The translator of Vincente Aleixandre, Roque Dalton,
Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, and Luisa Valenzuela, he was a
Guggenheim fellow and won a PEN International Translation Award. He
died in 2007.
"One of the great novels not only of Spanish America but of our
time."
*Carlos Fuentes*
"Donoso, as I have long believed, belongs to that small company of
storytellers who write not for a region but for the entire world: a
gigantic masterpiece."
*Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.*
"It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a
challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. 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."
*Nicola Barker - The Guardian*
"Donoso has learned to multiply by myth and this gives his work a
resonance and amplitude that puts him alongside Carpentier,
Cortázar and Garcia Marquez."
*Paul West - The Washington Post Book World*
"Donoso is one of the most important contemporary
Spanish-language writers. … He gave the novel a very personal
touch, distancing it from traditionally regionalist, realistic
Latin American literature, he greatly modernized it. This was
thanks, on the one hand, to a very broad literary education, to his
knowledge of English literature, which he preferred, and also to
his drawing from an inner life that was original, rich, with great
imagery and originality, a world constructed in his image and
semblance and into which he poured his manias, his fantasies, his
most secret ghosts, which was furthermore constructed with great
skill, with deep technical knowledge of the resources of modern
literature."
*Mario Vargas Llosa*
"With this book Donoso becomes a world novelist."
*Newsweek*
"The story line is like a great puzzle invested with a vibrant,
almost tangible reality."
*The New York Times*
"A challenging but wonderfully strange read."
*NoViolet Bulawayo*
"Yes, a miracle, a climactic act of magic for a book that is itself
both Miracle and Monster, like the best of this century’s American
fiction. I have no idea what fate awaits it, but it certainly
deserves to take its place alongside the major works of Asturias
and Fuentes, Cortázar, Borges and Rulfo, Vargas Llosa and García
Márquez."
*Robert Coover - The New York Times*
"Donoso must be counted as one of the spinal writers of the
extraordinary boom in Latin-American fiction which spread through
the reading world from the mid-sixties on."
*Alastair Reed - The New Yorker*
"Jose Donoso is my favorite author of the Latin American
boom (better than Gabriel Garcia Márquez)."
*Fernanda Melchor*
"And amid all this, Donoso wrote his masterpiece—in my opinion, a
perfect novel. The Obscene Bird of Night, out in an unabridged
translation by Megan McDowell from New Directions in April, is the
crowning achievement of the gothic horror genre. The style of The
Obscene Bird of Night is all its own, a story assembled from the
gossip of society’s highs and lows, which revolves and blurs into a
series of interlinked nightmares in which people lose their memory,
their sex, or even their literal organs. As you read, you wake from
one dream only to enter another, sentences moving between genders,
ages, and histories with such precision as to feel ambiguous."
*Zachary Issenberg - The Millions*
"Donoso lets his story disintegrate into a surreal mélange of
madness, cryptic rituals, and the proverbial abyss staring back. A
welcome, disturbing reminder of the power of magical realism to
distort and reveal by turns."
*Kirkus Reviews*
"In the Spanish-speaking world, Donoso is a combination of Madonna
and Arnold Schwarzenegger."
*Elena Castedo*
"A monument of vulgarity and erudition, perfused by an eerie air of
alluring, unsettling ambiguity… Donoso finds deep, dark, gleeful
power in the clarity and opacity of language—to capture not reality
but the fleeting and eternal strangeness of human existence."
*Greg Cwik - Slant Magazine*
"Donoso’s novel is, strictly speaking, an experience: of verbal
imagination and penetrating psychology, pushed to the limit;
fantasmal and exhausting, destructive and against the grain of the
realist tradition, it enriches the possibilities of fiction."
*Roberto Brodsky*
"The Obscene Bird of Night, a sprawling, five-hundred-page
masterpiece of psychedelic horror, is considered among the most
mind-bending and formally ambitious books of the Latin American
Boom—it makes One Hundred Years of Solitude seem quaintly
traditional by comparison. Originally published in 1970, the novel
has become an object of cult worship among lovers of dark,
puzzle-like stories, who consider it unfairly neglected outside
Latin America. But New Directions has marked the Chilean author’s
centennial with a revised translation by Megan McDowell that
restores twenty pages of text inexplicably excised from the
previous translation. In today’s cultural climate, when stories are
supposed to empower us to take a definite stance, Donoso’s
artful blurring of the real and fanciful, literal and metaphorical,
subjective and objective make The Obscene Bird impossible
to instrumentalize. To call it a class parable with no discernible
lesson may sound like an oxymoron, but the contradiction
illuminates a great deal about the nature of
power. "
*Max Pearl - The Baffler*
"After spending weeks with this teeming, magnificent novel—one of
the great readingexperiences of my life—I can only repeat what one
of its characters says of the plausiblyinfinite Casa, that it is ‘a
photographic negative…of the whole world.’"
*Dustin Illingworth - Southwest Review*
""The Obscene Bird of Night anticipated, by some fifty years,
the epistemological anarchy of the present… While his peers were
composing exquisite accounts of human beings moving through a human
world, Donoso imagined an inescapable house where timelines are
meaningless, where every fact is in doubt, where people speak in
many voices, take on many names, and are themselves only insofar as
they are also everyone else.""
*Daniel Yadin - Full Stop*
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