El obsceno pájaro de la noche is a very famous novel by the writer Jose Donoso, published in 1970. Here we will tell you about this book.
Summary of El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of the Night)
In Jose Donoso’s book, El obsceno pájaro de la noche, begins with a character called Humberto Peñaloza, who begins by narrating two somewhat parallel stories, but which relate to the stories between masters and their servants. Like the Azcoitía family, they were millionaires and landowners, but for this reason they were the cause of envy of the lower classes.
Humberto grew up under pressure from his father to “become someone”, so he had to study and with some savings they had he bought a suit, on the way they met Jerónimo de Azcoitía, who was a very wealthy man, he met Humberto and from then on he wanted to be like that man.
After many years, Humberto writes a book and asks Jerónimo to subsidise its publication, he accepts and hires him as his secretary, but Humberto becomes an insecure person, with fears and some obsessions, which are revealed in the course of the reading. We suggest you read La casa de Asterión
But Humberto has a great love for Jerónimo’s wife, who, after many years of marriage, has not been able to have a child to inherit the fortune. In the story, Petra Ponce appears and offers Ines a ritual so that she can conceive a son, but Jerónimo refuses, so Humberto confuses Ines with Peta and Ines finally manages to conceive an heir to the Azcoitía fortune, called Boy, who was a deformed child.
Jerónimo asks Humberto to create a place for Boy, away from people, so that he does not suffer the ridicule of others. Humberto took on the task and created a place called la rinconada, where only freaks would live, and he went looking for freaks in many places to bring them there. In this way Humberto managed to get many people with different conditions to go with him and now live better, paying them for their services, while Humberto dedicated himself to writing about this history of the Azcoitía.
Five years passed and Humberto left without having written anything, leaving La Rinconada in the care of the Empress. He escaped because Jerónimo ordered the doctor to remove some of his organs in order to regenerate Boy. Since then, Humberto, who calls himself the mute, has been working as a servant in the house, and from time to time he sees Ines, who often visits him in search of answers about her relative who died there.
Ines did not want to go back to Jeronimo and stayed at the convent where Humberto tried to rape her and when she said so nobody believed her and she was sent to an asylum. Some time later Jeronimo visited the corner and saw Boy who was already a teenager and discovered what his father had done. He left and saw what the world was like and realised that he was a complete monster and asked Doctor Azula to help him lose his memory.
When Jerónimo dies of drowning and Boy is operated on and has no memory, the doctor and the Empress go to Europe with part of the fortune and build their own clinic in Switzerland. Read the ravings of a civil servant in Diary of a Madman.
Analysis of The Obscene Bird of the Night
The Obscene Bird of the Night is a book by Jose Donoso, but in this work it shows the obsession of the characters, in the case of those who were servants to the masters, the obsession to be like them, the classes like those who are rich, powerful and with a lot of land, but at the same time they are without strength, decadent and without heirs. Your Wrong Zones is a self-help book not to be missed.
The servants, on the other hand, have few resources and are full of envy. In the book, the present, past and future tenses are constantly used and vary at different points in the story. The mudito, or Humberto, is one of the characters who feels very inferior to his bosses, which is why he lacks power and recognition.
The author creates a world between the normal and the monstrous, the possible and the impossible, it is not a linear story, but the past, present and future time pass as we read.
Here is a video about El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The obscene bird of the night) by Jose Donoso.
