A prize-winning writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and poetry
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.
All of a sudden, Blanca Arias has it all. The daughter of a middling Nicaraguan diplomat posted to Madrid, she marries, at the age of 19, the equally young and passionate Marquis of Loria, her darling Paquito, heir to one of the largest fortunes (and most august titles) in Spain. Paquito, as if on cue, dies of diphtheria, leaving the young Marquise alone, free, and inconceivably rich. Blanca isn’t exactly sure what she wants, but she knows that she’ll get it: “She never doubted her beauty, and she knew very well that the beautiful had the right to the best in everything.”
A parodic paean to the literary erotica of 1920s Madrid, this luxurious and disturbing work details the sexual awakening of the Marquise of Loria as her white-gloved chauffeur shuttles her from tryst to tryst. But it’s not all champagne and roses: Blanca’s mother-in-law, Casilda, is scheming with her gang of sycophants to take back “their” fortune from this newly-minted Loria. Once the mysterious Luna, a Weimaraner pup, infiltrates Blanca’s chambers, the story shapeshifts from an elegy to a glittering bygone era of Patek Philippes and gold-plated Deringers into something more savage: a psychological thriller and a profound investigation—what exactly hides beneath those surfaces that the rich are so busy gilding and polishing? Clearly, the author of The Obscene Bird of Night is never content to merely titillate.
As exuberant as it is explicit—and elegantly translated into English for the first time by Megan McDowell—The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria shows the Boom-era master Donoso in a lighter mode, and irresistible.
Translated by Megan McDowell, Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades
With a contribution by Alejandro Zambra
Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of a crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile’s most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jerónimo’s deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo’s wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful...
Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity. Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso’s pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author’s birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.
