Notable

THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT by JOSE DONOSO 438 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

This is the latest in an apparently unending procession of long, richly imagined novels from South America.

Like Garcia Marquez's bestselling One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is a densely populated, myth-ridden antiepic.

Like the elegant entertainments of Jorge Amado, it is filled with local allusions, jokes and satires--in this case Chilean--that few Yankee readers will know or even be aware of.

The central figure of the book, its fantasy-struck narrator, is a failed, elderly intellectual named Humberto. He is the caretaker of a huge, decayed and sparsely tenanted religious retreat house near Santiago. Those few others who live there--a mother superior, a few female orphans and a handful of ancient housemaids--know Humberto only as "Mudito." The name means "Little Mute," and indeed no one knows that Humberto can speak.

As one of the characters remarks, "Humberto had no talent for simplicity. He felt the need to twist normal things around." In fact the old man is simmering away in wild daydreams, and he is not the only one. Most of the characters are obsessed by the legend of blessed Ine, a child saint of witchlike proclivities who is said to have rescued the retreat house from an earthquake long ago and stayed around to haunt the place ever since.

Donoso has a lethally accurate ear for the cadences of Chilean people: aging, pious servants, provincials transplanted in the capital, the crumbling aristocracy. The elusive Ine is a perfect portrait of a working-class Santiago teenager. Along with legends and local lore, there is a great deal of fashionable literary rhetoric that unfortunately tends to make the author's truly bizarre creations more commonplace. When the didact in Donoso pushes the storyteller aside, the book comes perilously close to pomposity.

RABBIT BOSS by THOMAS SANCHEZ 468 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

This is a young man's novel--theme and scheme far too massive but stubbornly hefted anyway. The author follows the disintegration of a small Indian tribe, the Washo, who lived by hunting rabbits near Lake Tahoe. His central vision has brutal force: that the very first sight any Washo had of white men was in midwinter, high in the Donner Pass, at the moment when surviving members of a party of settlers began to eat their own dead.

The warrior who sees the cannibalism is shaken so profoundly that he loses all sense of the Tightness of things, and sinks into melancholy. He takes no further part in tribal life, understanding in some half-mystical way that the time of the Washo is finished.

The corruption and decay of the Washo require four generations, and in each generation Author Sanchez tells the unrelievedly gloomy story of one doomed Indian. The mood of the novel, as might be expected, is that of an incantation for the dead.

Although knowledge and talent have been spent on this ambitious book, two serious objections must be made. One is that to give his earliest Washo non-English speech and thought patterns, Sanchez invents a portentous lingo that just does not work ("Gayabuc, what say you? The Sun is heavy in the Sky, soon it will drop. We have walked the day ... What say you?").

The other and more serious complaint is that even the most vivid scenes are varnished over with a mournful brown glaze, which has the unfortunate effect of denying the reader his own clear view and his own sense of loss.

SYBIL by FLORA RHETA SCHREIBER 359 pages. Regnery. $8.95.

The cast of characters in Sybil Dorset's brain makes the heroine of Three Faces of Eve seem only mildly neurotic. As early as the age of three, Sybil began subdividing her personality, "dissociating" into other, utterly distinct characters. All had their own names, distinct vocabularies, accents and mannerisms. Vicky was gracious, self-assured, an attractive blonde. Mary was plump, quiet, with long brown hair, etc. Two of Sybil's other selves were boys who found it painfully confusing to have their residence in a woman's body.

For years, Sybil remained oblivious of their existence; she knew only that she blacked out and suffered terrible amnesiac lapses. Once, in her fifth-grade classroom, she came back to herself in the midst of an arithmetic drill and thought she should be in the third grade.

To the extent that multiple personalities are understood, it seems that Sybil's mind began creating alternative personages as a defense against her mother, who was a sadistic, child-battering schizophrenic. Brilliant (with an IQ of 170), yet mousy and depleted, Sybil finally embarked on psychoanalysis. Her doctor never quite knew which of her 16 personalities would turn up. After she underwent eleven years of analysis, treatments with sodium pentothal and hypnosis, the tribe of various selves merged into one coherent Sybil.

Author Schreiber, a former psychiatry editor of Science Digest, says that she met Sybil Dorset (a pseudonym) in 1962 through Sybil's psychoanalyst, Cornelia Wilbur. Her bestselling book is fascinating, but also troubling. As a kind of psychiatric New Journalism, it has a fictive, popularized vividness that undermIne medical credibility.

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