A man hides in a decaying mansion, hunted by whispers and old women who want to sew his body shut. Once he was a man of power. Now he’s becoming a monster.
Mudito, the mute caretaker of a crumbling Chilean abbey, tends to its ruins while fleeing his own memories. Once the trusted servant of a politician and the keeper of a hidden child, he now moves through corridors that blur dream and madness.
As the past collapses into hallucination, voices twist around him, blurring master and slave, beauty and deformity, the living and the damned. Reality unravels, and identity becomes its own prison.
Newly restored and translated by Megan McDowell, José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night returns in its unabridged centennial edition.
