obsessive narration

Obscene Nite Owl (1970, 2022, Penguin Random House), whose title was taken from Henry James by Chilean writer José Donoso, begins with the death of an old woman in what appears to be a convent or a squalid women’s asylum. and orphans. From the beginning, a narrative river is structured that shows two constants: the isolation of the characters and the humiliation in which they live.

It took the author eight years to write it, and he was obsessed with planning and development. José Donoso constructs and approaches two scenarios that escape logic with the construction of two realities that are isolated from daily life, without being bound to a specific time or referenced places, that have no visible connection between them, but are associated with the conceptualization that makes them possible. a very complex understanding of reality: on the one hand, La Chimba, with its countless terraces and rooms containing millions of packages, is presented in a chorus, a kind of mental hospital full of decrepit, miserable old women, would-be nuns, orphaned girls, unstable women. serving the plot and filling an entire scene with them by Dopey and Iris’s child, who is supposed to be locked in there; On the other hand, the Rinconada farm, which will serve as a shelter for a fauna of human remains consisting of monsters from nature, is a surreal environment from another world, but on this farm, Aizcoitía’s deformed son Boy will live surrounded by characters he does not feature. Two places to lock two different children.

The novel is structured by creating two male heroes who are structured in opposition to each other. One of them is a narrator and character transformed from Humberto Peñalosa into the figure of Mudito; and the other, Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía, the ruler of the lives of all the people who surround him. Both meet and part on the chance of the first narrative in the person of Humberto, the potential author and secretary of Don Jerónimo. Two men structured and developing in opposite directions: Don Jerónimo stands as a symbol of masculinity, strength, immutability; The other moves away from his masculinity, sheds his gender and enters the process of becoming equal with the old women of the house. Against them, Donoso shows that all women are subjugated without the possibility of independence or victory.

In the novel, everything is bifurcated, everything is fluid; A concise, colloquial syntax is used for the dialogues (p. 21) and massive sentences of more than 130 words with actions and explanations piled on top of each other (p. 23). This last type, which contributes to the meaning and existence of the novel, is the type that represents the reader the most and drags the reader into the same state of obsession in that oppressive, repetitive environment where the narrators have a confusion of people and characters. A point of view from which any attempt to seek logic is useless.

Everything that is told and how it is told is wrapped in terror, not only with ghost stories and real ghosts, attempts at sainthood and insinuations, but also with spaces transformed, times flowing from a present. into the past and also vice versa, without any prior notice to the reader. An imaginary novel that can only be the result of a different mind due to the development of the plot with no possible resolution. And I haven’t read it until now!

So why should you read this novel? Because, without taking into account political comments, an experienced reader can rarely be so carried away, so surprised, so rejected, as when reading a novel that is far from easy, completely experimental, where art is felt, enjoyed, but there is little in it . There are answers for everything it contains and not a single one.