Senselessness

March 31, 2008
The first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya's eight fictions to be translated in the U.S., this crushing satire has at its center a feisty young unnamed writer in penurious political exile from an unnamed Latin American country. It opens as he explains the daunting and dangerous freelance job he has taken in an also-unnamed neighboring state: to edit a 1,100-page report prepared for the country's Catholic archdiocese that details the current military regime's torture and murder of thousands of indigenous villagers. The writer despises the Church, but is moved and agitated by the disturbing testimonies of the survivors, at once unspeakable in their horror and unforgettable in their phrasing: “the more they killed, the higher they rose up
.” More or less one long rant, the book's paragraphs go on for pages as the writer gives way to paranoia, and to a sexual longing that his loneliness and powerlessness make nearly unbearable, and that he expresses profanely. It's Moya's genius to make this difficult character seem a product of the same death and disorder documented in the report, as the survivors' voices merge with his own.

May 15, 2008
This quirky seventh novel by Castellanos Moya, a member of Central America's younger generation of writers, is his first translated into English. The nameless narrator is lured from his native El Salvador to an unnamed neighboring country (ostensibly Guatemala, but it could pass for anywhere) to copyedit for the Catholic Church an 1100-page report detailing the atrocities committed by the army against guerrillas and their indigenous sympathizers. As he becomes more and more involved with the report, he assimilates its shocking testimonies, as phrases from the text, such as the opening line"I am not complete in the mind"haunt and torment him. Compulsive and paranoid, he imagines dire events are happening to him when reality indicates otherwise. In one instance, he hides so as not to be spotted by some questionable types he thinks are plotting against him; he panics when he feels hot breath on his neck, thinking that the perpetrators are out to get him only to find out that it's the panting of a mastiff puppy. The report's grimness is offset by the humor in the narrator's life, as when an amorous episode is aborted when the protagonist takes a whiff of his lover's smelly feet. The narrator eventually escapes this nightmare by fleeing to Germanyor so we are led to believe. Recommended where Latin American literature is popular.Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

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