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Senselessness

by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Katherine Silver (Translator)

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 · rating details · 492 ratings · 88 reviews

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 givi...more

Paperback, 142 pages

Published May 17th 2008 by New Directions (first published 2004)

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May 03, 2011 Mike Puma rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: the few

Recommended to Mike by: Señor Bolaño

Shelves: new-directions-publishing, 2011, salvadoran-author

Another week, another 5-star review—it can’t be helped; this one richly deserves it. This novel came to my attention after seeing a quote on Castellanos Moya from Roberto Bolaño somewhere and then finding another one on the back cover of this incredible book:

One of the great virtues of [his work]: nationalists of all stripes can’t stand it. Its sharp humor, not unlike a Buster Keaton film or a time bomb, threatens the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read [his work], have an uncon

...more

One of the great virtues of [his work]: nationalists of all stripes can’t stand it. Its sharp humor, not unlike a Buster Keaton film or a time bomb, threatens the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read [his work], have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

Nor can I.

Castellanos Moya is a stylist—a stylist of the Faulkner/McCarthy/Marías school—using very long, convoluted, complicated sentences that convey, not only the story, but the feverish pace at which the narrator comes to realize that his own circumstances and sensibilities have begun to mirror those of an indigenous population whose words—their oral histories—reflect the torture and killing of their families and neighbors at the hands of a brutal Central American government in a text to be published by the Church (which was either complicit or condoned the earlier aggression). The narrator keeps a notebook of various lines from the text which almost serve as a summary of his own changing circumstances.

Perhaps I’m just a pushover when it comes to novels narrated by translators, or poets, or authors, or in this case, an editor—who other than an editor would use a sentence like:

For always the dreams they are there still, 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 an adverb to wring the neck of time.

—but in each case of this sort, I’m usually either very moved by the language or tremendously disappointed. Fortunately, I’ve had more good experiences than bad. This is another that won’t be for everyone and is guardedly recommended for those who are more interested in the telling than the tale—which is not to say the story disappoints, but rather to say that the telling is stunningly accomplished.(less)

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Mar 20, 2012 Lee rated it 3 of 5 stars

Disappointing, especially considering the style and the subject matter. The narrator's long-sentence Bernhardian ranting begins in the beginning instead of developing with exposure to the one thousand one hundred page report of atrocities. The narrator therefore pretty much starts and ends at the same place -- ie, pretty much freaked out, neurotic, lupine. Common petty vices (venery, intemperance, greed) are juxtaposed with uncommon crimes against humanity. Sex scenes are sort of hotly/humorousl...more

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Dec 05, 2011 Jeremy added it

Shelves: latin-american-fiction

While the obvious comparisons to Thomas Bernhard are there, this is a spleenful, paranoid monologue with a character all its own. Moya skitters between the narrator's own crippling self-awareness, the increasing (and apparently justifiable) terror that he will become a target for a military that has no qualms about massacering large swaths of the indigenous population, and also obssessing over the monsterous details of the human rights abuse report about those massacres that he is editing. And t...more

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Jan 07, 2009 Francisco Cardona rated it 5 of 5 stars

How do you write about genocide? Would you even want to engage into such a dialogue? The narrator of Senseless engages these questions as he attempts to edit testimonials of indigenous populations of central America that underwent genocide in preceding wars. The narrator himself is exile that causes a disjunction in how he perceives the texts he is hired to edit. There is no clear authority to who can write or speak about genocide and consequently history becomes an act of hysteria rather than a...more

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Feb 21, 2009 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Thanks to a startling cover and some well-chosen blurbs (Roberto Bolano and Russell Banks), Senselessness was an impulse purchase last weekend in a Williamsburg bookshop. A strong motto from Antigone (“My lord, the good sense one has by birth never abides with the unfortunate, but goes astray.”) and a great opening sentence, long and and agile (“I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t jus...more Thanks to a startling cover and some well-chosen blurbs (Roberto Bolano and Russell Banks), Senselessness was an impulse purchase last weekend in a Williamsburg bookshop. A strong motto from Antigone (“My lord, the good sense one has by birth never abides with the unfortunate, but goes astray.”) and a great opening sentence, long and and agile (“I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack, not by any means, but rather the sentence that astonished me more than any other sentence I read that first day on the job, the sentence that most dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced pages placed on what would be my desk by my friend Erick so I could get some idea of the task that awaited me.”), also fueled the impulse.

The unfortunates in Senselessness are the narrator, who is also not complete in the mind, and the peasants whose tragic story is told in the one thousand one hundred page manuscript that the narrator has been hired by a Catholic human righs organization to edit. The narrator drinks too much, has a boyish obsession with girls, is paranoid, and is overwhelmed by the horrors he reads about, copying phrases and sentences into his notebook for their folkloric literary merit. He reads them to colleagues, friends, dates, partygoers—unnerving himself and others as he does. “Our houses they burned, our animals they ate, our children they killed, the women, the men, ay! ay!...Who will put back all the houses?” “If I die, I know not who will bury me.” “For always the dreams they are there still.” “The more they killed the higher they rose up.” Some are violent descriptions of slaughter and distrubingly graphic. Others are allusive but vivid indicators of the enduring trauma suffered by those who survive brutality, particularly when they are alone in their survival.

The setting is an unamed Latin American country, perhaps El Salvador. The surrounding politics is external to the narrative, which is told through the unreliable narrator. You see his world, his room and outings, his flirtations and business interactions, the manuscript as an overwhelming task, a symbol of death and danger. His paranoia distorts everything, at first in small, subtle ways, but soon in totally panicked fits of violent fantasy. Early he imagines himself perpetuating acts of violent vengenance on those who annoy him; later he imagines himself being stalked my the military, the Church, the novios of girls he’s had a tryst with and eventually they all combine. The girlfriend’s novio is the commander of a death squad; his friend Erick is involved in a conspiracy that turns party guests into the resurfaced murderers from the manuscript. Nothing is certain, except that no one is complete in their minds. The narrator begins a series of flights, from a party, from his home, to and from a monastic retreat, and finally the country. When you finally decide that his madness, which may have nothing to do with disturbances evidenced in the manuscript of human rights violations, has so overwhelmed his reliability to undermine even what he’s told us of his manuscript—what if it’s a novel he can’t write? What if there is no manuscript?—Moya brings you back to earth with a clear intrusion of the reality his narrator has been fleeing.

The novel is brief, compelling, at times absurdly comic, and at times disturbing. Moya is a deft writer, creating a complex narrator and darkly intricate tale with economy and conviction. Hope New Directions brings more of him into print in the states.(less)

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Apr 25, 2013 Bjorn rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's an important job they've given our nameless narrator, simple but important. In a fragile Mesoamerican democracy (also never named) where people still carry memories and scars of torture chambers and massacres and the people who committed the atrocities have all been pardoned and kept their old positions, the catholic church has hired him to copy edit 1100 pages of testimonies from hundreds of massacres during the recent civil war. Page upon page upon page of the most horrific descriptions,...more It's an important job they've given our nameless narrator, simple but important. In a fragile Mesoamerican democracy (also never named) where people still carry memories and scars of torture chambers and massacres and the people who committed the atrocities have all been pardoned and kept their old positions, the catholic church has hired him to copy edit 1100 pages of testimonies from hundreds of massacres during the recent civil war. Page upon page upon page of the most horrific descriptions, deeply traumatised people talking about how they saw their families chopped to pieces, their neighbours executed, their daughters raped and their sons raping.

I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn't just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack...

This is, of course, a comedy.

A very dark and uneasy comedy, to be sure. It's not the horrors themselves that Moya makes fun of (the book is loosely based on real events). But he lets the quotes get filtered through a narrator who is not only a self-centered chauvinist who's more than a little paranoid, but above all exactly that: a narrator who completely misses the point of his own story. Just like Moya himself (exiled from both Honduras and El Salvador) he's not from this country but from one of the ones next to it, so he's always a little outside both the society and the stories he's supposed to edit. And so he starts treating them as stories. He romanticises, he admires them as works of literature, he makes them a picturesque background for his own heroic tale of himself as he struts around town, tries to pick up young girls, fights with priests and believes himself a subversive and dangerous journalist when he's really more of an Ignatius J Reilly. And the more he submerges himself in the horrible story he's editing and exaggerates his own role in it, the more he becomes convinced that everyone is after him. Which, of course, is ludicrous: he's a nobody, not even his own bosses take him seriously. Except maybe not. Because all of it did happen, and everything isn't safe...

Senselessness is short but sharp, with no easy moral. It seems to deliberately want to force the reader to subvert their own role in it: to rob us of that safe (geographical and psychological) distance between the events of the novel and our own armchair by having a ridiculous narrator who's trying - and failing - to keep a distance to the events of his own novel. He uses every word to constantly question and undermine our attempt to read it as just a black comedy or make easy sense of the relation between fiction and fact. It's not quite a great novel, especially in the way it ends just as it starts to get really good, but it's a bewildering read that will stay with you for some time.(less)

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Apr 02, 2013 Wes rated it 5 of 5 stars

OK, I (and, I'd imagine, a lot of other Americans) first heard of this book via a George Saunders interview. So thanks George Saunders, good looking out, much appreciated.

The narrator is one of the most lovable assholes I've ever encountered. Intelligent, sardonic, alcoholic, lecherous, paranoid, enamored with beautiful/haunting language, and concerned above all else with self-preservation. He doesn't care about much more than saving his own ass (and getting paid) but he doesn't BS you about it...more

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Jan 21, 2011 Aquavit rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am not complete in the mind

The title is the opening sentence in this strangling little novella - I read Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya in something like two GRIM HOURS. It’s hard to believe I was laughing at page 60-something and then by page 135 I felt I’d been beaten up. The style is breathless and fast - starting right off with enormous sentences peppered with commas that run the length of three and a quarter pages, the violence tangental and brutal, and the narrator’s mental dec...more

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Apr 30, 2010 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-mainstream

Castellanos Moya, Hoacio. SENSELESSNESS. (Published 2004 as “Insentatez”; this edition published in 2008 in translation by Katherine Silver). ****. This is the first book by Moya that I have read. Moya was born in Honduras, but grew up in El Salvador. He now lives in exile in Pittsburgh, PA. The book tells the story of a young man who is hired to proof read and edit a 1,100 page manuscript that tells of the massacres and other atrocities that occurred in, presumably, El Salvador. The manuscript...more Castellanos Moya, Hoacio. SENSELESSNESS. (Published 2004 as “Insentatez”; this edition published in 2008 in translation by Katherine Silver). ****. This is the first book by Moya that I have read. Moya was born in Honduras, but grew up in El Salvador. He now lives in exile in Pittsburgh, PA. The book tells the story of a young man who is hired to proof read and edit a 1,100 page manuscript that tells of the massacres and other atrocities that occurred in, presumably, El Salvador. The manuscript consists mostly of first person accounts of survivors of the various horrors inflicted by the guerillas and death squads of the government. He has agreed to do this for $5,000 over a period of three months. What we see happening, however, is that he becomes profoundly affected by the testimony of the survivors, to the point that he becomes paranoid over his own safety. He does everything possible to dispell these fears; he begins drinking; he starts several unsuccessful relationships with young women in the town. He recognizes that the writing in the manuscript is a direct recording of the conversations of, mostly, peasants, and begins to write down snippets of sentences that he feels capture the essence of their terror and anguish. These snippets, though innocuous in and of themselves, tend to bring back all of the horror that they lead into. Soon his paranoia becomes overwhelming. He fears that death squads are after him, too. He no longer trusts his friends and acquaintences. He asks to be sent to a safe and isolated place where he can finish his job in peace. Even there, he is pursued by death squads, led by an infamous general named in the chronicles as a leader of many of the horrors inflicted on the peasants. He finally escapes back to the city and manages to get out of the country, but the ultimate effects of his reading the manuscript keep him in a state of fear. The story is told in a stream-of-consciousness style that is at first obtrusive to the narrative, but ultimately becomes easier to read as you become accustomed to it. Actually, it works quite well. The pace of the novel is very fast; you can picture it as a film. It is ultimately a condemnation of both sides: the guerillas and the people who are trying to expose them. Recommended.(less)

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Jan 07, 2010 Jesse rated it 5 of 5 stars

Like being tortured. That's not an insult to the book--it's what this novel feels like and wants to convey. An unnamed translator ends up in an unnamed country (though it's Guatemala, from historical and cultural references), proofreading an 1100-page compendium of atrocities. Though not everyone seems to know why he's there, or to trust him. And he's, to put it mildly, highly unreliable: he keeps having these disturbing sexual fantasies and can't seem to understand why people keep bestowing "st...more

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Jul 25, 2009 Leif Schenstead-Harris rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Mature, intelligent, thoughtful people?

Well, its either a five star book, or a one star, is what I'm thinking. I wrote a longer review elsewhere, here's a bit of it

"how are we to enjoy this prose, though? It’s content is either horrific torture or overwritten ramblings. If we find the former beautiful, even to be troubled by it, we are exactly like the copyeditor, callous in our acclaim for language in the face of such atrocities, acts to which the only proper response would be silence or howl or a Celan-esque attempt, ultimately fru...more Well, its either a five star book, or a one star, is what I'm thinking. I wrote a longer review elsewhere, here's a bit of it

"how are we to enjoy this prose, though? It’s content is either horrific torture or overwritten ramblings. If we find the former beautiful, even to be troubled by it, we are exactly like the copyeditor, callous in our acclaim for language in the face of such atrocities, acts to which the only proper response would be silence or howl or a Celan-esque attempt, ultimately fruitless, at a transformation of language and idiom together. But Castellanos Moya has ensured that we’re not safe, even in our horror or disgust, from the essential crime here, which is the continuance and appreciation of literature and aesthetics in the face of such grief." (Dustin, from The Common Reader)

And it is exactly this which ensures the power of the work. The narrator ever returns to a lurid and escapist but never gratifying sexuality, failing to distract himself from the brutal and short phrases which so invigorate him, and which eventually overtake his entire personality with their powerless simplicity: a seeming contradiction, but a very real threat for any purveyor of another's misfortune. His tendency to blurt these sentences out, no matter who is listening, or what circumstances he is in, becomes a monument to their emotional power - though they are the muttered testimony of nearly-powerless peasants, these sentences strike with the force of a bomb, just as Senselessness demolishes the reader and itself, messily, without any attempt of resolution.

Bolano says "there is nothing magical about his books...its sharp humor, not unlike a Buster Keaton film or a time bomb, threatens the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read [his books:], have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a writer." And indeed, an uncontrollable life-force animates Senselessness to the point of embarassment, formenting laughter and horror indelibly entwined, resulting in a powerful (anti-?)statement. Moreover, it is incredibly linked to what we credit as real. Moya has been exiled from his home and threatened repeatedly with death, as a journalist he bears witness to a genocide that killed one in every 20 Guatemalans, approximately 200,000 people: the text the narrator edits is analagous to Nunca Mas, a real record of atrocity. O'Driscoll writes "in its own way, though, Senselessness asks readers simply to see. Its narrator, says Moya, 'doesn't want to be there. ... He doesn't want to recognize that he is being affected not only by what he's reading, but by the whole situation in that suppressed society.'"

Here's a few links that I used:
http://mcnallyjackson.com/blog/2009/0...
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews...
http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyr...(less)

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May 25, 2009 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This much-praised novel by the Honduran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya is a powerful study of the horrors of political violence and the paranoia is provokes. The narrator is hired by the Catholic Church, which he hates, to edit an 1100-page manuscript of first-person accounts of the government's slaughter of Indian villagers. The awkward but strangely poetic syntax of so many of the lines he reads infiltrates his mind and soon interweaves with his own peculiar, and sometimes horny, reality. He...more

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Dec 28, 2008 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, new-directions

Something about this book didn't seem quite fully developed. The book should have been a bit longer, but I'm not quite sure what would have been added to the book that wasn't already there. Maybe bring the absurdity more to the surface of an atheist working for the Catholic Church or something. I don't know. Maybe because the blurb on the book mentioned that I wanted to see that more developed.

The narrator is working for the Catholic Church doing a final copy edit on a thousand page report of f...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: salvadorean

Very, very disappointing. The protagonist is copyediting an enormous manuscript that documents atrocities committed against indigenous people. As the book opens, the copyeditor is hypnotized by a sentence he has read: "I am not complete in the mind." It was written by an indigenous man after he had witnessed his family being cut to pieces. The copyeditor knows the things he is reading about, and the ways they are expressed, are too much for him, and he wonders if they are affecting his mind. His...more

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Feb 09, 2010 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

Darkly funny book about horrible events in recent Guatemalan history.

Paranoid, womanizing alcoholic copy-editor loses what little was left of his mind while proofing a 1,100 page account of atrocities committed against the country's indigenous population.

This book (like David Griffith's "A Good War is Hard to Find") is about violence and how we process the pain of others, and how violence in art impacts us as well. Often hilarious in the same breath that it is darker than nearly anything I've e...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Kyle Blalock rated it 3 of 5 stars

After finishing the last page I sat bemused, thinking that I had been robbed of some high reading experience that I was expecting. It didn’t do much for me as a story goes. It withered down to nothing in the end really. I didn’t gain anything from reading it.

The voice and style Moya used is interesting, and at times enjoyable. The rants of the character’s mind were expressive of an emotional mind. I liked digging into his psyche as the story developed. I liked how I didn’t really know if all of...more

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May 10, 2012 Amy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Read this book. Moya uses run-on sentences without getting tiresome and manages to tell a story of suffering, depravity and paranoia that is funny, beautiful and raw. The main character is a mercenary poet, cynic and lout who is hired by the Catholic diocese of an unnamed Central American country to edit a one thousand, one hundred page manuscript of eyewitness testimony to crimes against humanity that occurred during the country's recently concluded civil war. As he drinks and launches trashy c...more

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Jan 05, 2009 Stop added it

Shelves: reviewed

Read the STOP SMILING review of Senselessness:

The late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño once wrote that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s work is “insufferable to nationalists,” that it “threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles.” Though Bolaño died before he could read Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez, recently published in English by New Directions, he would doubtless have found in this little novel the most substantive and astounding manifestations of the Salvadoran novelist’s dogged and graceful host...more

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Jan 17, 2009 Obisbooks rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: translations

This short novel has some beautiful passages and some long rambling, please end the sentence passages. The narrator is hired by the Catholic Church to copy edit a report about the military slaughter of indigenous peoples, even though he hates the Church and is very paranoid and is living in exile. Some of the report he finds "literary" and he writes the sentences that speak to him into his own notebook, most of it is violent and causes great despair. It's more about him than the atrocities and t...more

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Aug 14, 2008 Erin rated it 4 of 5 stars

read the first paragraph. it is a microcosm of the rest of the book. brilliant run-on sentences, anxiety-riddled ramblings and a woody-allen-would-be-proud paranoia-induced plot. i hope more of his stuff will be translated.

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Jul 25, 2012 Anita rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: spanish-literature

This was an incredibly powerful book. It subtly alludes to the Guatemalan Civil War, something that might go over the reader's head if they miss the names Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo and Efrain Rios Montt. it deals with the narrator's descent into paranoia and madness as he edits the accounts of the massacres that occurred in the country for thirty-six years. But at the same time the novel questions how we talk about the accounts of survivors. Especially in this case where the indigenous peoples' tes...more

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Feb 15, 2010 Matthew Balliro rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

Simply gripping from start to finish. Moya reads a break-neck pace, with sentences stretching over whole pages and challenging your attention in a Proustian way, but it's always with a purpose, it's always to get to a revelation that's not really a revelation but some sort of grounding that sends our narrator hurtling through a paranoia-filled self-centeredness. We're not supposed to like or sympathize with the narrator so much, I think, as we're supposed to just sit in awe of the violence- and...more

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Dec 04, 2009 Jason Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars

A slim little novel that plumbs the depths of paranoia and the psychological impacts of exceptional violence. The narrator is editing a compendium of eyewitness testimonial accounts from natives of an unnamed central country that were slaughtered by their country's military establishment. The stark garbled prose of the non-native speakers—wonderfully and effectively translated in the truest of senses—reads like poetry and is collected as such by our hero in a little notebook. He carries this lit...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Jacob rated it 4 of 5 stars

And now I can claim that I've read two books with copy editors as protagonists. This one is a deluded, mad pig such as one might find in Nabokov (a Nabokov far less prim), but the milieu is Bolaño's. Tasked with correcting 1,100 pages of testimony from survivors of the Mayan genocide during the Guatemalan civil war, the narrator's response is aestheticization, copying chilling, gnomic phrases like I am not complete in the mind and For always the dreams they are there still into his notebook so t...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

I’m not so sure that the question that springs to mind while reading this book is "how does one write about genocide?" but instead, how does one read about genocide? With righteous indignation? Morbid curiosity? Solemn observation? Fond speculation?! (more about that in moment)

This is a text about a reader; an eccentric reader who is not “complete in the mind”. Towards the end of this slim volume it occurred to me that the narrator may not be telling the story as it happened but rather recounti...more

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Feb 01, 2012 Jeff Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, latin-america-fiction, own, violence

Often when we read stories that are very compelling, it stays with us for a long time. A book may infect us in a way that we physically experience what the main character is going through. (I remember experiencing this when reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind when he told of the harsh famine. I can still feel the hunger pangs).

We tell our friends about it, we quote from the book, we go on and on about it. Now, imagine that this book is a 1,100 page tome about the massacre of Indians by the m...more Often when we read stories that are very compelling, it stays with us for a long time. A book may infect us in a way that we physically experience what the main character is going through. (I remember experiencing this when reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind when he told of the harsh famine. I can still feel the hunger pangs).

We tell our friends about it, we quote from the book, we go on and on about it. Now, imagine that this book is a 1,100 page tome about the massacre of Indians by the military filled with graphic eye-witness accounts of murder and atrocities that’s so powerful the same thing happens. Seeing page after page of this violence would start to seep in. It might drive one crazy. That’s essentially what happens in Senselessness. It’s an examination of how violence even if conveyed in book form can drive one to madness.

It was a very gripping tale, though comical at times. Even though it is frantically paced, with the longest run-on sentences I’ve ever seen (some times covering whole paragraphs, even pages), that pace starts to quicken as time goes on. It goes from the author’s obsession with the work (a work he has been paid to edit) to fear that those who don’t want the work published want him dead. I liked how it conveyed how violent images, even if one didn’t directly witness the acts, can be re-lived by a reader. Knowing that such things happened and people suffered so much is a condemnation to violence.

“But on the fourth day, I have to admit it, my mind went out of control and I no longer had any moments of relief, the barbarities I read about again and again—while searching for the last misplaced comma, the astute slip of the tongue, or the slightly unclear sentence, because at this point it would have been insane to delve into revisions of the actual content…as if the bellyful I had read had not been enough; my mind had to wander through a vicious circle of images that by midnight were disturbing me so much that I just barely managed to slide open the glass door to step out onto the cold dark patio and howl like a sick animal under the star-studded sky.” p. 127(less)

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Feb 08, 2010 Steev Hise rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those interested in the dirty wars of latin america or latin american literature

Shelves: novels, politics

Moya is one of the great world contemporary novelists. This book is like candy with an iron fist wrapped around it, or something. What I mean by that is that it's very funny and entertaining in one sense, as we follow a narrator who is a somewhat cynical and sex-obsessed horndog writer from a nearby country who has taken a unique copy-editing job: he's working for the catholic church in Guatemala (the country is never named but I recognize names, like Rios Montt, the dictator who presided over s...more

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Aug 04, 2008 J.M. Cornwell rated it 3 of 5 stars

Paranoia, pathos and destruction in a bizarre tale of a journalist turned copyeditor.

”I am not complete in the mind”, begins the journalist who has been paid to edit a five hundred page report on atrocities committed during a series of massacres seventeen years before. It is the first gem of the poetry of the oppressed to be collected in the journalist’s notebook. It is a sentence dominates his unstable mind as he slogs through the one thousand one hundred page report that he has been paid too l...more

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Feb 13, 2009 chris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Man. Parts of this book are a real kick in the face. The narrator is a complete scumbag, but who seems to have both a soft spot for victims and a deranged association with the perpetrators of vast social tragedy. As he slowly sinks into whatever state of conciousness he is in in the end, it is hard to feel bad for him, as he identifies his troubles with women as the same kinds of troubles as the slaughtered indigenous people had with their attackers. Really?! But it is precisely this ridiculousn...more

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May 31, 2011 Stuart rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: the-internationale

This book came recommended to me by Anne McLean, translator of Javier Cercas, Hector Abad, Julio Cortazar, and others. It's brief and so goddamn powerful. The narrator has been hired to copyedit 1,100 pages of testimony by indigenous people in Guatemala who have survived torture and massacres. It's an unsettling, paranoiac, surreal, Kafkaesque tale, with a bit of Camus thrown in for good measure.

I'm hoping there are other books by Horacio Castellanos Moya translated into English!

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About Horacio Castellanos Moya

Salvadoran novelist and short story writer.

Horacio Castellanos Moya and his family moved to El Salvador while he was only a few years old. He lived in San Salvador until 1979.

He then worked twelve years as a journalist in Mexico and has lived in Costa Rica, Canada, Guatemala, Spain and Germany, under the auspices of the Frankfurt International Book Fair.

From 2006 to 2008 he was writer in residenc...more

More about Horacio Castellanos Moya...

Books by Horacio Castellanos Moya

El Asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador

El arma en el hombre (Colección Andanzas)

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“...y a partir de ese golpe el alma en pena del registrador civil contaría su historia, en todo momento con las palmas de sus manos sin dedos apretando las dos mitades de su cabeza para mantener los sesos en su sitio, que el realismo mágico no me es por completo ajeno.” — 1 person liked it

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Senselessness

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