La confirmación de Horacio Castellanos Moya como uno de los grandes maestros en el tratamiento de la violencia y el horror de la realidad centroamericana.
Sin pensárselo dos veces, y sin prever hasta qué punto esa decisión cambiará su vida, el protagonista deInsensatez acepta un comprometido encargo de su amigo Erick: revisar la versión final de un informe que consigna el genocidio padecido por los pueblos indígenas de un país centroamericano. Así, instalado en una exigua habitación del arzobispado de la ciudad, el protagonista se enfrenta a más de mil cuartillas que reproducen denuncias de supervivientes y testigos. Atisba entonces un horror que lo fascina y abruma, pues en los textos que va leyendo encuentra metáforas, giros y dislocaciones de lenguaje que recrean vívidamente matanzas y actos de crueldad que, de otro modo, serían inexpresables. Al margen de esa ingente tarea, sin embargo, transcurre la realidad cotidiana del protagonista,una realidad a veces frívola y promiscua que contrasta conla sensación de acoso y peligro que lo invade y con su obsesión por una violencia que podría convertirse en su infierno. ( )

I first read Moya because 'Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador' was too wonderful a title to ignore, and that sucked me in to looking at his other books. Very glad I did; if Marias is Henry James meets James Bond, Moya is Bernhard meets Joseph Conrad or some other angry anti-imperialist. You get great style and the utter horror of murderous governments, without the soothing that often comes with that stuff. The narrator is an asshole, all too prone to making other people's suffering into his own. You and I, too, are assholes.

Also, can't miss drive-by attack on magical realism [kisses fingers and mouths, belissimo!] ( )

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. (Dec 2013) ( )

It's a horrible, horrible story; it destroyed its narrator and bid fair to make me a whispering zombie; man's inexpressible vileness and irreducible cruelty are a weight too heavy for me to bear. His task is to copyedit a human-rights report commissioned by the Archbishop to ascertain the guilt and/or innocence of the parties to a genocide. Every step of the narrator's descent into mental illness's loudest darkest corners is punctuated by italicized phrases he's culled from this report...all one thousand one hundred pages...for their unusual, beautiful euphonious horror: I am not complete in the mind greets the reader on page one. A man who lived beyond the violence that stole his family from him utters those words to a psychologist as the report takes shape, as the professional records the words and assesses the soul that left the body of the speaker so as to bear witness.

I didn't read the original Spanish, but I'll wager there's nothing lost in the translation. It's too precisely evocative. It's also extremely prolix in its one hundred forty-two pages. Words pile up, words wind around your eyestalks, words make dizzyingly alien geometries as they flow from the desperately purging narrator. Words distance him, though not the reader, from the blood and hate and evil he must view as structures and concepts in order to earn his five thousand United States dollars for copyediting one thousand one hundred pages of agony. The slaughter of untold bodies is actually the less revolting part of the tale...Wounded, yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful is not something a grandmother should say of her murdered descendants...and the litany of one thousand one hundred pages reminds us that the narrator is doing a job, is taking the written results of an investigation, is applying grammar and punctuation to the massive, traumatized shouting of the victims of genocide.

We all know who are the assassins. ( )

Very entertaining. ( )