Only read less than halfway through, very good condition! In a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of discarded ob-jects, muttering to himself. There are plots afoot. Old women are hunting him through the halls: are they concerned friends or witches out to capture him, bind him, change him into something unrecognizable? The mute caretaker has his own quarry: a young orphan girl, whom he will entrap and use in a twisted ploy for revenge and as the story whirls on like a vortex of rotting lacework, voices that shift and multiply weave a horrifyingly familiar reality out of paranoia, illusions, and lies, where each is trapped within their own Russian doll of unstable selves, shrinking, decaying, always scratching, scratching, scratching towards a memory of youth, power, and glory. The Obscene Bird of Night, José Donoso's towering achievement, has been acclaimed as "a gigantic masterpiece" (Kurt Vonnegut), "a challenging but wonderfully strange read" (NoViolet Bulawayo), and one of the great novels not only of Spanish America but of our time" (Carlos Fuentes). Now the star translator Megan McDowell has revised and completed the classic 1973 translation, which had omitted nearly 20 pages of material. In this definitive edition, the full text of Donoso's "pajarito" —with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded-returns in print to celebrate the centennial of its author's birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.