Donoso himself considers the El obsceno pájaro "una cosa ya completamente barroca" [a completely baroque thing]. Deeply enmeshed within this narrative tour de force and central to the intent of the novel is the erotic motif—or cluster of motifs. As in much of Donoso's work, the force of the theme derives from a kind of kinetic discharge between opposite poles: youth-age, wealth-poverty, power-impotence, etc. Moreover, his concept of literary character … transforms the inhabitants of his books into masks, into personae, as this term is understood in classical drama. As such they become the vehicles through which the "gods"—read elemental forces—express themselves. A special feature of this technique is that the masks are changed with such vertiginous frequency that instead of characters possessing normal identities we have mere nuclei, beings who serve as focal points for the author's thematic concentration…. [For] Donoso sex does [in...