I wanted Jose Donoso’s Obscene Bird of Night to be magical realism, not magical surrealism as a friend suggested, or stream of altered consciousness as I suggested, or peyote prose, which neither of us thought to suggest, but might explain everything. I wanted a Chilean version of Haruki Murakami or Mikhail Bulgakov, but that’s not what I got. Not at all. Sad […]
All I remember about Ken Russel’s 1983 production of Madama Butterfly is the atomic blast that put the button on Butterfly’s death. He flashed a bank of stage lights, hitherto unseen, directly at the audience, and in the seconds it took our eyes to readjust, turn-of-the-century Nagasaki was transformed into a floor-to-fly-space blaze of corporate logos – Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Sony – as if the explosion had blown […]
