Lost in the Labyrinth
BOLGER, EUGENIE
Lost in the Labyrinth The Obscene Bird of Night By Jose Donoso Translated by Bardie St. Martin and Leonard Modes Knopf. 438 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Jose Donoso has produced one...
...In one sentence, for example, Donoso describes a character going home...
...In this context, ambiguous passages seem more the product of carelessness than of any reasoned deliberation...
...Throughout, Mudito's narrative jumps from past to present and back again, piling symbols on top of legends...
...he complicated and deformed his original project so much that it's as if he'd lost himself forever in the labyrinth he invented . . ." The Obscene Bird of Night becomes, similarly, not an account of chaos, but chaos itself...
...In this retreat populated only by freaks and monsters, Humberto spent his days in a tower attempting to write...
...Thus, although The Obscene Bird of Night is not a masterpiece, it is already being called that in several quarters...
...The result is less a novel than an antinovel, a work from which all prevailing notions of order have disappeared...
...While this interweaving and repetition of symbols is interesting, what it leads to is seldom clear...
...Donoso, a Chilean who writes with undeniable vigor and imagination, eschews literary realism, like so many of the Latin Americans whose works have been published here in the last few years...
...In fact, we learn that Mudito is Humberto Penaloza, a writer who was once secretary to Jeronimo, a wealthy politician married to Ines...
...The whisperings of the women in the Casa, punctuated with the refrain, "they say, they say," are themselves a species of legend...
...A yellow bitch dog, the embodiment of a witch in an old legend, prowls the estate of Ines and Jeronimo, and, in the form of a plastic replica used in a game, brings Ines phenomenal luck...
...in the next sentence we are told this same character has remained in a shop with some friends...
...Word comes that the Casa is about to be torn down and replaced by a new, modern Children's Village...
...Despite assertions to the contrary, it turns out that the book was written before the events in it took place, at a time when the two men were scarcely acquainted...
...In the end, the reader is left wondering how much of the book's obscurity stems from an attempt to express the unfathomable, and how much from a refusal to organize material...
...Mudito himself may or may not be mute, as his name suggests he is...
...The Casa, originally built as a religious retreat for a saint-like ancestor of the powerful Azcoitia family, is now a ruined maze of courtyards and cells, inhabited only by a few old women, a mother superior, three nuns, and a handful of orphans...
...Combining elements of legend and witchcraft with astute sociological observation, he creates his own intense, intricate world...
...A more serious inconsistency concerns Humberto's book, an account of Jeronimo's life written at his specific request...
...Mudito relates all these interlocking tales, often in a style that blurs traditional distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity, so that it is difficult to separate what is truly perceived from what is only imagined...
...As in a dream, identities shift, time and events are distorted...
...Fortunately his symbols, if not his philosophy, are arresting...
...he is certainly not the simple-minded old man he appears to others...
...Nowhere does Donoso suggest that Humberto is prescient, nor does he seem interested in destroying conventional ideas of sequence...
...To preserve it as the sanctuary of her ancestor and namesake, the present Ines de Azcoitia goes to Rome to obtain beatification for the legendary saint...
...Humberto was assigned to supervise an establishment created for the Azcoitfas' son Boy, a creature so deformed that Jeronimo hid him away...
...But along with an almost tactile sense of mood and character and some superb vignettes, he also attempts to convey a wobbly metaphysical vision...
...The pointlessness of these ambiguities casts doubt on the validity of others...
...The criticism of Humberto's writing made by a character in Donoso's book is equally true of the work at hand: "Humberto had no talent for simplicity...
...Events from the life of the earlier Ines repeat themselves in the life of the contemporary one, along with themes and characters from a parallel legend about a young witch who was cloistered in a convent...
...The story is narrated by Mudito, caretaker at the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnacion...
...Myths and suggestions of witchcraft color and alter the most ordinary affairs...
...All the conventional rules are discarded yet no new ones are introduced to replace them...
...Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Jose Donoso has produced one of those difficult, chaotic novels so marked by talent and invention that critics tend to overpraise them, vivid imagery and originality prompting many to see as genius what is merely disarray...
...The imbunche, a mythic monster created by witches when they sew up all the bodily orifices of a stolen child, is also invoked to describe states of mind and conditions of being...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 19
