PARTISAN REVIEW
485
di sfi gured peop le in o rder to make the child believe he's no rma l) a t the ap–
parent extremes and the myth o f the Virgin-witch at the twi sting intersection .
Th e Obscene Bird
is at once a parodic life of Buddah and a modern ver–
sion of both Dante's
Inferno
and Bosch 's
Garden of Earthly De–
lights.
A popularized surrealism, it might also be seen as
The Child–
hood of Rosemary's Baby,
but Donoso often brings Gothic fright to
th e p itch of Lookingglass sublime as when he describes women knitting baby
clothes for five years as they wait fo r a baby to be born who will wear them.
Days , months, yea rs wear out th eir expectations and the clothes dwindle with
their hopes until " those clothes became so minuscule ... tha t they must be
picked up with tweezers and looked a t under a magnifying glass to apprecia te
the fastidious luxury o f deta il. " Do noso's imagina tion is so proliferating tha t
at times he seems a bou t to deli ver a thalidom ide novel, but his perpetual
transmogrification of characters, events and places into the mute's tex t, which
is the text you read , di scovers a dark .intelligence, which you may ca ll ba roque,
as opposed to the transpa rence o f reason. U ltima tely, the book is the ca rrying
of an idea to its bewildering conclusion-the tex t o f a text as a tex t in a text–
and the novel is a vast black mass of the written word.
In contrast to this imaginative extravagance, Manuel Puig's
Heart–
brea k Tango
is a brief, restrained story of a tubercular, small-town gigolo
who kills himse lf with smoking, drinking and sexua l excesses and o f his igno–
rallt fri end who is sta bbed to dea th by a serving girl whom he had impreg–
na ted. Where the reader is overwh elmed by Donoso and brea thless ly tries to
keep up with hi s nightmarish vision , the reader is exposed to a minima l text in
Tan go
which relies on tag lines from Argentine boleros and tangos or from
Holl ywood film s to evoke its intentiona ll y corn y world and on documents
such as death no tices in newspap ers, physician 's letters and police reports in
conjunction with the soft-centered diction of its cha racters to yield the verba l
content o f tha t world. Characteristically, there is a lmost no narra tive as such
in Puig's book, save fo r dead-pa n sta tements o r questions which foll ow or
p unctua te the cha racters' mu sh. The result is a conjun ction o f easy sentiment
("My obsession, hea rtbreak tango, plunged my soul to deepest sin ") and dry
narra tion ("Sa turday, April 18, 1947, a t 3:00 P.M., Juan Carlos Jacinto
E. usebio Etchepare ceased to ex ist") as if Puig were ma tching the Na usicaa
episode from
Ulysses
to thatof the Ithaca chapter.
Eliminating the non-stop inventiveness tha t characterizes novels like
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
The Obscene Bird,
Puig
economi zes hi s ma tter. In Donoso, fo r example, we a re stunned aga in and
aga in by the ev ident magic o f th e work we read; in Puig, as was the intention
but so seldom the success o f th e French new novel, we a re gra tified by the
emo tion , even th e ana lys is w ithheld. Put crudely, the apparent difference be–
tween
The Obscene Bird
and
Heartbreak Tango
is that between
