Horacio Castellanos Moya

Acclaimed Salvadoran author Moya's astounding debut in English has a peculiarly lighthearted, and in fact comic air even as it is tormented by the violence of history ("El Pais").

Senselessness

Macy HB

For always the dreams they are there still, I said as a kind of amen when Johnny finished his story, which created a certain discomfort among those present, especially the birthday boy, who perhaps thought my words were part of some foreign ritual he wasn’t familiar with. For always the dreams they are still there, I repeated, a splendid sentence that had lit up my afternoon at the archbishop’s palace, its sonority, its impeccable structure, which spread itself out into eternity without skipping over the moment, its use of adverb to wring the neck of time, a sentence spoken in the testimony of an old indigenous woman from who knows which ethnic group and that could have been referring to the massacre whose bones the team of forensic anthropologists, of which Johnny was a member, were digging up, a sentence both luminous (due to its suggestion of possible meanings) and terrible (because it was in fact about the nightmare of terror and death). For always the dreams they are there still, I proclaimed for the third time, my eyebrows raised, on the verge of enthusiasm, so that they would understand once and for all its transcendence.

Planet Earth doesn’t want to know anything nor does she understand what the comet tells her, for she is happy in her orbit and hates to be disturbed by someone who appears only everyone in a while from who knows where.

It was senseless also for me to fervently chant the sentence, Wounded yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful, for that belonged to the sorrow of an indigenous woman who had survived a massacre not to a copy editor who was jogging precisely to avoid being left either wounded or dead.

Donald

This is a disturbing but very good novel. The misogyny of the protagonist stands against the sensitivity and horror of his project, and this has one of the best final pages I have read in a long time.

If anyone out there lives in Pittsburgh, please track Horacio Moya down and let me talk to him!

A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: Senselessness, acclaimed Salvadoran author Horacio Castallanos Moya's astounding debut in English, explores horror with hilarity and electrifying panache. A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

Jessica Smith

This is a wickedly funny novella; not laugh-out-loud humour, but a drier kind that had me smirking most of the way throughout the book. It reminded me a lot of the lecturer I had for my first two years studying Spanish, though – the main character here is a paranoiac of an academic who's supposed to be editing a 1,100-page report into massacres of indigenous people, but actually spends most of his time boozing and womanising. So you know, they seemed to have a lot in common. This probably enhanced my enjoyment of the book though, the sense that all of these misfortunes were befalling his Central American alter ego.

One thing I would say about this book, though, is that going in I really thought it was going to talk about the ways indigenous narratives get rewritten and thus reinterpreted by the exact kinds of forces like the Catholic Church here compiling this 1,100-page report. Considering the number of times that the narrator commented that the testimonies he proofread were so lyrical he thought they had to have been composed by poets, I definitely thought it was going in that direction once I'd started to read it. But… then it didn't? It completely and totally failed to follow that up. Considering what an issue it is in historiography, the way indigenous voices (and really non-bourgeois voices in general) get sanitised and spoken over and reinterpreted in accordance with the ideology of the ruling class… I thought that raising the issue and then discarding it completely was such a missed opportunity. But oh well.

I'm giving this four stars, even though I had no real issues with it aside from that! It's a really entertaining, quick read.

Senselessness

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