[In Donoso's] early fiction, a limpid style and straightforward narrative technique provide the matrix for the portrayal of complex characters, who are often, and variously, obsessed: a fat man who dances himself to death, a youth whose ambition is to do nothing but sleep, a transvestite who earns his keep by doing flamenco dances in drag, and so on…. [Critics] wídely proclaimed the largely traditional nature of his narrative. The delirious and intractable complexity of his most recent novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche, is consequently all the more startling, for this is clearly a work intended to confound the reader. The narratorial voice, adrift in time and space, confuses past and present, fuses distinct characters, and proliferates events with a manic inventiveness that utterly disregards verisimilitude….

[A] disjunctive leap from tradition to monstrosity is itself internalized in the themes and structures of El obsceno...