At the time of its initial publication in Spanish, José Donoso’s extravagantly grotesque novel The Obscene Bird of Night seemed to lend itself to a primarily political interpretation. It was 1970, and his native Chile was in the throes of the election campaign that resulted that September in the victory of Salvador Allende, the country’s first socialist president, and a sweeping effort to reorder its social and economic structures. Donoso’s novel read easily then as a deliberately outlandish allegory of the centuries of exploitation and oppression that were fueling Allende’s rise, and by the time the book appeared in English in 1973, the situation in Chile had cemented that impression: Allende and the transformation he sought were being besieged by the forces of reaction, and General Augusto Pinochet was soon to launch his bloody coup.

A half-century on, in a translation newly revised by Megan McDowell and with material excised from previous American editions now restored, Donoso’s novel registers very differently. A political interpretation is still possible, should one choose to lean in that direction, but The Obscene Bird of Night is too rich, deep, and complex to be confined to that single, limited view. In a time replete with manifold political monsters every bit as awful as those Donoso imagined, his novel also seems prescient in its presentation of gender, religion, and, above all, the anomie that results from the breakdown of the ties binding the individual and the community.

Today’s reader also has the benefit of access to two volumes of Donoso’s diaries and the insights that his daughter, Pilar, provided in Correr el tupido velo (2009),a controversial warts-and-all biography of her father. That book, which is not yet available in English and whose title translates as something like “Lifting the Veil,” drew on decades of written reflections and recalled conversations that revealed the difficulty, even anguish, Donoso experienced in writing The Obscene Bird of Night. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also made clear the degree to which he saw some of the book’s most repugnant characters as proxies for himself. “I write this novel a little to find out who I am,” he acknowledged. “What interests me is chasing down the ghosts, or not chasing ghosts, but finding what is ghost and what is me.”

On its surface, The Obscene Bird of Night is a family saga, a multigenerational history of the Azcoitías, who are a fictionalized version of the Subercaseaux, Larraín, Matte, Edwards, and Balmaceda families, which along with a dozen or so other elite clans dominated Chile for centuries (and to some extent still do). The Azcoitías are great landholders, patrons of the Roman Catholic Church, and owners of an estate called La Rinconada and an almshouse for old women known simply as La Casa. But as the novel opens, the family line is threatened because Senator Jerónimo de Azcoitía and his young wife, Inés, are unable to conceive a child. At the same time, the almshouse, where the “pale, skinny, feeble, dirty, crushed” maids and nannies of aristocratic families are sent to live out their final years, is becoming dilapidated, and the archbishop who administers it for the family wants them to transfer their title to the Church so that the complex can be torn down and replaced with a children’s home and lucrative new private housing.

Eventually—and apparently with the assistance of witchcraft, though it is difficult to be certain, since Donoso leaves the actual circumstances, like so many other things that happen in the novel, blurred and ambiguous—a son is born. But he is severely deformed, so much so that his father decides to shut him away from society and adopts what might be called a reverse Buddha strategy. Instead of confining the child to the grounds of a palatial manor in order to shield him from the horrors of the outside world, as legend says Siddhartha Gautama’s father did, Jerónimo de Azcoitía resolves to bring to La Rinconada as many monsters and mutants as his factotums can recruit, in hopes that Boy, as he is called throughout the novel, can be given the illusion that he is normal. His is to be “a world where deformity wouldn’t be an anomaly but the rule.”

“Nothing around Boy must be ugly, mean or ignoble,” Jerónimo decides.

Ugliness is one thing. But monstrosity is something else again, something of a significance that was equal but antithetical to the significance of beauty and, as such, it merited similar prerogatives. Monstrosity was the only thing Don Jerónimo de Azcoitía would set before his son from his birth on.

To that end, a cast worthy of Tod Browning’s Freaks is enlisted: pinheads, hunchbacks, “acromegalic giants, albino females as transparent as wraiths, girls with the extremities of penguins and ears like bat wings,” as well as “dwarfs of every imaginable variety: with enormous heads, with the wrinkled faces of dolls that have aged, with stunted legs and high-pitched voices, avaricious, proud, intelligent.”

The principal narrator of the interlocking stories of the estate and the almshouse is Humberto Peñaloza, a would-be writer full of ideas that he is unable to commit to paper. Of modest origins, he has taken the job of Jerónimo de Azcoitía’s private secretary, and thus is not only privy to the family’s darkest and dirtiest deeds but also the protector and occasional perpetrator of them. Having to shuttle between the two equally repulsive realms proves too much for him, and we watch his personality disintegrate as he turns into El Mudito, “the little mute,” and then deteriorate even further. Karl Ove Knausgaard employed a similar strategy in his novel A Time for Everything (2004), in which angels decay over the centuries into seagulls, but with Donoso, the process of subhumanization is more accelerated, more extreme, and even more powerful.

None of this, however, is made explicit in The Obscene Bird of Night.Instead, points of view shift without warning, multiple voices produce a narrative cacophony, time circles back around itself, and plot points merge and diverge. In a useful introduction, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, five decades younger than Donoso, writes of his initial disorientation upon reading the novel, even though he was familiar with the writer’s work. The Obscene Bird of Night is liberated “from those friendly signals that in his other novels—and in the vast majority of novels in general—are like discreet markers we use to orient our steps,” Zambra writes. “Donoso does not soften or sweeten anything,” and the resulting “sense of estrangement is projected throughout a novel in which myths and witchcraft and beliefs are part of a worldview that fully incorporates its protean elements into an experience of the world.”

Chile is mentioned by name only once in the more than 450 pages of The Obscene Bird of Night, which gives the novel a certain universality that made Donoso’s Spanish friend Luis Buñuel contemplate making a movie version of it, and also led to an American stage adaptation performed by the Trinity Repertory Company Theater in 1989. But to Chilean readers, there is no mistaking the setting for anyplace else. There are, for instance, repeated references to the Azcoitías’ landholdings south of the Maule River, an area that occupies a special place in Chilean history and is the scene of one of the stranger episodes in a novel full of them. In the pre-Columbian era, the river marked the southern frontier of the Inca Empire; the Mapuche peoples beyond were so fierce in their resistance to aspiring overlords that they were not subdued until the nineteenth century, which gave the region on the far side of the river a reputation for recalcitrance that endures to this day. The Maule is also a literary river, the subject of many poems, paintings, and stories: the poet Pablo Neruda was born and raised in the region, as were many of the other members of the surrealist generation of 1920.

But the most overtly Chilean element of the novel, and a continuing source of dread for many of its characters, is the ogre from Mapuche folklore known as the imbunche. Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) describes it as “a human being perverted into a monster by a special scientific process” that “disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet” of an infant stolen from its parents and then “alter[s] the position of the head…with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180°, that is, until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.” Donoso’s version of the imbunche includes even more horrific features: his also have

their eyes sewed up, their sex organs sewed up, their anuses sewed up, their mouths, nostrils, ears, everything sewed up, letting their hair and their fingernails and their toenails grow long, turning them into idiots, making the poor things worse off than animals, filthy, ridden with lice, able only to hop around.

Traditionally, an imbunche controls the access to a warlock’s cavern and serves as his enforcer, so it should hardly be surprising that it is Humberto Peñaloza who identifies most closely with it. At times he fears being transformed into an imbunche, while at other moments he sees such a fate as a blessed release from his role as Jerónimo’s henchman and Inés’s frustrated would-be lover. “Leave me alone, let me eradicate myself, let the kindly old women bind me,” he muses to himself. “I want to be an imbunche stuck into the sack of his own skin, stripped of the capacity to move and desire and hear and read and write, or remember, if I can find anything in me to remember.” That, he tells himself at another juncture, “would be complete peace.”

For obvious reasons, when The Obscene Bird of Night first appeared in English, critics categorized it as an example of magical realism and Donoso as part of the Boom, the explosion of literary creativity that swept Latin America in the 1960s. But Donoso chafed at being pigeonholed that way, even though he was friendly with and admired many of the writers with whom he was lumped. In a short book called The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History (1972), he dismissed “the hypothetical Boom” as a “creation of hysteria, envy, and paranoia” to which “every Latin American novel belongs and will belong…becoming bulkier and bulkier, until the end of time.”

Stylistically, Donoso stands somewhat apart from other Latin American writers of his generation. Absent from The Obscene Bird of Night is the exuberant Caribbean playfulness of Gabriel García Márquez or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as well as the strain of social realism found in early works of Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. In this respect, Donoso’s friendship with Buñuel may be relevant, and not just because of their shared tendency toward anticlericalism: in their distinctive ways, each can be considered an heir of Francisco Goya, especially the bleak canvases of the late Black Paintings (such as Saturn Devouring His Son or Two Oldsters Eating Soup) and the earlier Los Caprichos prints, two series featuring crones and witches who bear a striking resemblance to the inhabitants of La Casa. Of all the great novels of “the hypothetical Boom,” and there are many, The Obscene Bird of Night is the most unrelentingly dark and pessimistic.

Donoso’s novel takes its title—signaling its harrowing tone—from a sentence in a letter that Henry James Sr. wrote to his sons Henry and William, part of which also serves as the book’s epigraph: “The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” In the biography of her father, Pilar Donoso relates a bizarre incident that she says Donoso later credited with sparking the novel. As her father was standing at a corner in downtown Santiago waiting for a red light to change,

his attention settled on a big black car, very luxurious. It was driven by a chauffeur of Nordic appearance, dashing and blond, but in the back seat he saw a young fellow of indeterminate age, though past adolescence, magnificently dressed—silk shirt, pin-striped flannel suit—but totally deformed.

The origins of Donoso’s dyspeptic outlook and eye for the grotesque are hard to pinpoint. Born in 1924 into a well-to-do family in the Chilean capital and educated at an elite private school, he won a scholarship to Princeton, where he wrote his senior thesis on Jane Austen and published his first pair of short stories, in English. Returning to Chile, he taught English for a while and then wrote his first novel, Coronation, a scathing satire of the Chilean upper classes that did not sell well when it appeared in 1957 but won critical acclaim. A pair of short story collections, much journalism, and other novels followed, most notably Hell Has No Limits (1966), a portrayal of life in a brothel in the Maule region whose main character is the bordello’s transgender madam; that short novel began as a fragment of The Obscene Bird of Night,but when Donoso was stymied by writer’s block, it was spun off into a separate book that he would later call “the most perfect, with fewest errors, the most complete” of his works.

Donoso’s diaries and his daughter’s biography make clear that creating The Obscene Bird of Night was a torment for him. It took over his life for nearly a decade, and was written and rewritten, in fits and starts with numerous dead ends, on three continents: it was begun in Chile, continued in Mexico City at Carlos Fuentes’s house and in Iowa City, where Donoso was a writer-in-residence at the Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1960s, and finished in Spain. By the time the Chilean novelist Carlos Droguett visited Donoso in Barcelona in 1969, “he wanted to be rid of it, he had begun to hate it, he said that the papers, notes, transcripts, alternate versions scattered everywhere, had become a paper-strewn hellscape” that left him “physically ailing, nervous and neurotic just at the sight of it.” When the book was at last done and word of its brilliance was spreading, García Márquez wrote to Fuentes that “I believe it: neurasthenia of that intensity has to be good for something.”

Perhaps because of the richness of its language—what Megan McDowell in her translator’s note to the new unabridged edition calls “its slippery, fragmented narrator and its labyrinthine, refractory circus of a story”—The Obscene Bird of Night has also had a complicated translation history. As McDowell explains, Gregory Rabassa, the greatest translator of his generation, was the first choice to render the novel into English, but when he proved to be unavailable, the task fell to Hardie St. Martin, who started working on the book before it was even published in Spanish. “Donoso would rewrite sections that were supposedly finished, resulting in a back-and-forth of manuscripts that must have been terribly onerous in that pre-email era,” McDowell writes, and at some point St. Martin left the project, in circumstances that remain unclear. Leonard Mades came in at that point to, in McDowell’s words, “fine-tune” the text and “incorporate some of Donoso’s final changes.”

At the same time, though, Donoso’s editor at Knopf, which in those days was the go-to publishing house for just about every Latin American writer of note, was calling for cuts to the manuscript. In the end about twenty pages were trimmed, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. The material excised includes some of the most hallucinatory and nightmarish passages in the book, so perhaps Donoso’s editor thought that American readers simply wouldn’t have the stomach for them. In any case, with that material now translated and restored, “this book is the first English edition to reflect the definitive Spanish text,” McDowell writes.

As part of her assessment of the book for this new version, McDowell also made some alterations in the original translation. “It’s not a re-translation,” she explained in an email exchange; “when I felt like something didn’t work, didn’t make sense or sounded outdated, I tinkered.” But where the original translators “made decisions that weren’t necessarily the ones that I would have made, but weren’t wrong, that didn’t constitute reason enough to change it.” Thus the Spanish word patio, which appears more than one hundred times in the original text, continues to be rendered mostly as “court,” with its primary meanings that come from the legal and sports worlds, and not the more colloquial “courtyard.” But overall, the original translation, which McDowell calls “careful and musical,” seems to have held up well. “Not for nothing did the book win the 1974 PEN Translation award,” she remarks.

McDowell is certainly the right person to undertake the task of reviewing and revising. An American, she has lived in Chile for many years and is thus familiar with the Chilean slang and words of Mapuche origin that pepper Donoso’s novel. She has translated most of Zambra’s work, as well as that of older Chilean writers ranging from Arturo Fontaine to Alejandro Jodorowsky and other youngish Latin American writers such as Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez. Her translation of Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2022, and her work has also won an English PEN award and a pair of O. Henry prizes. But even among those works, The Obscene Bird of Night stands out. “After spending time in the world of Donoso, I can honestly say that the experience of working with this novel has shifted what I think is possible in fiction,” she writes.^*

As Zambra acknowledges in his instructive and witty introduction, which includes an amusing account of the only time he met Donoso, the grandeur of The Obscene Bird of Night and the brilliance of its prose have made the novel an object of awe and intimidation, a kind of totem, for every Chilean writer who has followed. In his typically caustic fashion, Roberto Bolaño, of the generation midway between Donoso and Zambra, tried to distance himself from that gravitational pull: “From the neo-Stalinists to Opus Dei, from the thugs of the right to the thugs of the left, from the feminists to the sad little macho men of Santiago, everyone in Chile, secretly or not, claims to be his disciple,” he wrote sarcastically. That didn’t prevent Bolaño, however, from ingesting elements of Donoso’s novel The Garden Next Door (1981)—a Chilean writer in self-imposed exile as a protagonist, use of a reportage style, and a sardonic plot focusing on the pettiness of Latin American literary politics—and spewing them out again in The Savage Detectives.

But Zambra’s generation, born during the Pinochet dictatorship, has been more generous. “The fact is that his novels held up to all our interrogations, all our prejudices, any possible myopia or fickleness,” he writes. Indeed, Donoso would go on to write other excellent novels—I’m particularly fond of The Garden Next Door and A House in the Country (1978)—before his death in 1996, and two works issued posthumously, El Mocho (1997) and The Lizard’s Tale (2007), are also of high quality. But The Obscene Bird of Night towers over everything else, which helps to explain why Harold Bloom included it in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) as a prime example of “the chaotic age” in which we live. More even than the original, this welcome new edition is proof that, as Goya put it, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”