Sean Stevens’s Reviews > The Obscene Bird of Night > Status Update

“Old women like Peta Ponce have the power to fold time over and confuse it, they multiply and divide it, events are refracted in their gnarled hands as in the most brilliant prism, they cut the consecutive happening of things into fragments they arrange in parallel form, they bend those fragments and twist them into shapes that enable them to carry out their designs.”

“I'm not even in love with you. You don't even awaken in me one of those aberrant nostalgia that men my age feel with the proximity of a young life: you are an inferior being, Iris Mateluna, a piece of primary existence that surrounds a reproductive uterus so central to your person that all the rest of your being is a superfluous shell…”

"The novel is ultimately about a frustrated, stunted identity: its main character or uncentered polyphonous narrator is imbunche, a thwarted, mutilated man enclosed within various prisons both chosen and imposed, and he struggles to be seen and to communicate in a world that shifts from realistic to monstrous to sordid. "