Senselessness

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 show more 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. show less

Moya , born in Honduras but grown up in El Salvador and now living “in exile” in the USA, has apparently published eight novels, but this is the first translated into English. I fervently hope that it will not be the last. Latin American writers seem to have perfected the short, powerful novel that deals with deep human and societal issues, the sort of books that stay with you afterwards, bring up new thoughts, make connections to other things you are reading: I think, for example, of Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Bolano: By Night in Chile; Fuentes: The Eagle’s Throne. Senselessness is very much a book in this genre.

The protagonist is a writer, self described as a “depraved atheist” who agrees to take on a project show more for the “perfidious Catholic Church” despite, “the hearty revulsion I felt toward the Catholic Church and all other churches”. The project: to edit a 1,100 page report on the testimonies of indigenous people who survived massacres by the country’s military. A complicating factor is that the military is still very much in charge and our writer becomes increasingly paranoid, not without reason, about military intelligence kidnapping him for torture or arranging a convenient mugging and death in the streets, because they are aware of the report and obviously not keen on its publication. An added complication is that reading the report (and the descriptions of torture, death, and depravity, while not extensive in the book, are not for the faint-hearted) begins to twist and dominate our writer’s mind and his life in all respects. He feels, early into the project, “…a chilling sensation…as if I were about to live out a destiny in which my will barely counted and whose principal feature was danger”. This pretty well describes the lives of the indigenous peoples, and others, whose lives are manipulated, crushed and ended by the all-powerful, all-arbitrary, all-uncontrolled military. It is a nightmare world for many, but often ignored by many.

Our writer begins to keep a notebook in which he records sentences and phrases from the testimonies of horrors beyond comprehension. Phrases such as: I am not complete in my mind; The houses they were sad because no people were inside them; 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; Because I don’t want for them to kill the people in front of me. Our writer thinks these are poetic and he reads them repeatedly and often quotes them to uncomprehending friends who think he is getting a little crazy. And maybe they are poetry because only through the images and allusions in poetry can one even try to touch these things, to convey the horror of the events and the anguish, the intolerable anguish of the survivors, because any other narrative, any other stringing together of words cannot even come close to the sense of what it means to see your children and then your wife chopped into pieces in front of you and you are then left to live with that. The minds and souls of the survivors are also dismembered and in a sense, the dead are the lucky ones.

At one point, our writer, exhausted by his reading of the report fantasizes that he is the official in charge who returns to, “the hut of those fucking Indians who would understand the hell that awaited them only when they saw flying through the air the baby I held by the ankles so I could smash its head of tender flesh against the wood beam”. This is so horrible it is hard even to write it, but it recalls a quote from Margurite Duras to the effect that if you cannot imagine yourself as an SS officer pushing women and children into a gas chamber, then you have not really looked into your soul. The soul of our writer is seared by his internalization of the images and the anguish that he reads over and over in the report.

And finally, another quote that our writer puts in his notebook: They were people just like us we were afraid of. This is the ultimate anguish and incomprehensibility, that these horrors were perpetrated by ordinary people, people “just like us”.

The Church, actually the archbishop, has the courage to commission the report and to proceed with its publication despite the animus of the military rulers, but implicit throughout are questions that our writer does not really explore but just lets lie there: Where was the Church when these horrors were being perpetrated? Where was its voice of opposition? Where was its Christian charity and forbearance? Was it because these were Indians, dispensable in a racist view?

The quotes I have given above may turn off some readers who might think the book too macabre, too upsetting to read. I hope not. The descriptions do not dominate the book. Moya takes us into the mind of our writer and at least conveys to us the anguish of this man trying not so much to comprehend the incomprehensible, but just to deal with it, to live with it, to live with something that once learned can never be extirpated, that is seared into the soul. This is a powerful novel. It deserves to be read and pondered. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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!]

Wow. Trippy and gripping. This is Latin/Central American fiction like I haven't read before. Very urgent and paranoid, but also quite desperately funny at times, which of course only heightens the sense of terror at other times.

This is the first of Moya's eight novels to be translated to English. Here's hoping for more very soon. The guy's a star.

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, show more 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. show less

For me Horacio Castellanos Moya's 'Senselessness' is a tour de force. Narrated as it is by an atheistic and often inebriated writer in exile from his own country who has been hired by the Catholic church to edit the papers and testimonies of indigenous peoples--survivors of massacres perpetrated on them by their own country's military--testimonials so disturbing that certain lines he reads tend to follow him around all day so much like a tune or song which a listener can't get out of his head. He tries numerous ways to distract himself--getting drunk, chasing women but whatever he does the situation always ends with him remarking on the horror that those lines recall. Increasingly exasperated he rages against the clergy he show more loathes--pacing agitatedly about a cramped office sometimes acting out alone the barbarities these confessions conjure up.

The action of the book is driven along by obscenity--moreso in image but also in language at times. In describing the death of a local village official--a civil registrar--he wonders if maybe he could use some of the material and turning it into a work of fiction:

'for the lieutenant urgently needed a list of the villagers who had died in the previous ten years so he could bring them back to life so they could vote for the party of General Rios Montt, the criminal who had taken power through a coup d'etat and now needed to legitimize himself through the votes of the living as well as the dead, so as to dispel any doubts, something the civil registrar of Totonicapan never understood, not even when the contingent of soldiers broke into his house and he knew his fate was sealed, not even when he felt the sharp blows that sliced off his phalanges did he admit that such a register was in his hands, even as they were being amputated, although the register did exist and he had hidden it under some firewood in his backyard, according to my version, because the testimony didn't give many details, he had preferred to die rather than turn the register over to the lieutenant from the local garrison, for this is precisely what the novel would be about, the reasons why the civil registrar of Totonicapan had preferred to be tortured and murdered rather than hand over the death register to his executioners, a novel that would begin at the precise instant the lieutenant , with one stroke of the machete, split open the head of the civil registrar as if it had been a coconut from which he would remove the delicious white pulpy flesh, not the bloody palpitating brains, which may also seem appetizing to some palates, I must admit without any bias, the instant that blow fell the restless soul of the civil registrar would start to tell his story, always with the fingerless palms of his hands pressing together the two halves of his head to keep his brains in place, for I am not a total stranger to magical realism, The wtory would begin with the explanation that the soul of the registrar would remain in purgatory until somebody could enter him into the death register, which was very difficult to given the fact that he alone knew where he had hidden it, which is why the story would center around the efforts of the civil registrar's soul in purgatory to communicate with his friends so they could write him into the death register without the military finding out, and throught this would be revealed the history and the significance of the register, which had been in the hands of his family for generations, a son and grandson of civil registrars dedicated to their profession, that is, a story of suspense and adventure that I should have begun cobbling together that Sunday morning while I was still lying under the sheets wiht my thoughts playing some kind of disorganized ping pong game, if at the time I had been a novelist, needless to say, and not just a copy editor of barbarous cruelties who dreamed of being what he was not.'

'Senselessness' is always driving and intense and chock full of paranoia and bitterness. It is a very dark comedy about the barbarism of Latin American military dictatorships and the oftentimes obtuse willfullness of the Catholic church in this case not supporting the military dictatorship but intent on scoring political points against it in the international arena.

It is not light entertainment and some readers will probably be more horrified than amused. It is at least IMO a great comedic work if you consider say some of Kafka or Celine's darker works funny. It has its points to make on the human condition--on greed, ambition and bloodthirsty pathological mentalities being given free reign. Blurbs by the great Roberto Bolano, Francisco Goldman and Russell Banks. Very cinematic--this is not a long work (142 pages) and reads very swiftly. Part of the Bolano blurb goes like this: '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 books], have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a writer.'

He apparently has written several other novels but this is Castellanos Moya's first appearance in English translation--hopefully not his last. I really--really liked this--a must for those interested in Latin American fiction. It may be for me the best example of a short fictional work that I've read coming out of that region. show less