Senselessness [Paperback]

Horacio Castellanos Moya (Author), Katherine Silver (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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)
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Review

This dark and comic novel is a deft exercise in paranoia and the cost of reckoning with an enormity. (San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein) REVIEW: Reader does not experience fright so much as the verbal bounce of...well-sprung prose. (The New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal) REVIEW: A perfect sense of black-comic timing, the book's style is distinctive. (Times Union, Elizabeth Floyd Mair) REVIEW: An innovative and invigoratinly twisted piece of art. (The Village Voice, Jed Lipinski) REVIEW: This masterwork...recently translated seamlessly into English...is an arresting read. (SF Gate, Mauro Javier Cardenas) REVIEW: Manages a brilliant narrative strategy...where everything happens at once. (Ron Slate, Ron Slate) REVIEW: Chaotic, rampaging approach that characterizes almost the entirety of this short, spirited work. (Daily Literary News, Sameer Rahim) REVIEW: A brave and important novel. (Ready Steady Book, Stephen Mitchelmore)

Reader does not experience fright so much as the verbal bounce of...well-sprung prose.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217078
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217071
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #187,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How can a book this terrifying be so funny?, June 3, 2008

By 

R. Reese - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Senselessness (Paperback)

Reading Senselessness is like being sucked into a literary whirlwind-- it pulls you in immediately and intensely, and it never lets go. It is above all else a great read. Fortunately it is short, or you might starve, it is that compelling. And it is very, very funny, though be warned: its humor is always ironic and on-the-edge.

Imagine Lenny Bruce writing a Graham Greene novel where the narrator is Lenny Bruce imagined by Graham Greene. Imagine a situation where style itself is politically volatile and editing akin to the erasing of memory and people, literally "rewriting" history (not in the "as if" vein of Saramago, as a counter-argument to the idea of history, but as the accepted standard version at the heart of politics and power.)

And finally, consider: the narrator-editor is a loquacious, paranoid, horny, and non-pc yet politically fastidious and sensitive observer. Worried that he himself has become entangled in the violent politics surrounding the book he is editing and possibly about to become the next victim, he is also moved by the stories he edits-- testimonies of indigenous witnesses to atrocities who are not "native" speakers of the language (Spanish) in which they give testimonies, testimonies already professionally "cleaned up" by sociologists and oral historians. So in some ways, the book's problem is to "restore" the truth and speak the unspoken, perhaps the unspeakable, indeed locate a reliable author/authority.

Senselessness is a serious piece of post-modern literature that offers the fun and thrills of a roller coaster ride-- total loss of gravity in the hands of a master of panic.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I am not a total stranger to magical realism.", November 2, 2009

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Senselessness (Paperback)

The nameless narrator of SENSELESSNESS is engaged to copyedit an 1,100-page manuscript collecting and analyzing the oral eyewitness testimonies to the slaughter, torture, and rape of indigenous peoples of a Central American country (not identified, but surely Guatemala) by governmental forces during a civil war. Midway through his work, he resolves not to try to turn any of the testimonies into a novel, "because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples." Yet that is exactly what Castellanos Moya has done in SENSELESSNESS.

The testimonies, which are scattered throughout this novella, are horrendous and gruesome, repulsive yet riveting. They tell of machete-butcherings of entire families, torture, emasculation, and gang-rape. The narrator becomes haunted and possessed by stray sentences from the testimonies. For example, "The pigs they are eating him, they are picking over his bones"; "There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them"; and "I am not complete in the mind". Sadly, those extracts are NOT fictitious. They and others from the novella are from actual testimonies that Castellanos Moya reviewed. Woven into the warp and woof of the novella, they make for extraordinarily powerful fiction.

But what elevates SENSELESSNESS to another plane is that it is not solely an account of horror and mayhem. It also deals with the effort to go on with life as if such barbarity did not, and does not, happen. Outside work on the project, the narrator pursues the life of a hip, cosmopolitan, young professional -- parties, bars, restaurants, and skirt-chasing. Indeed, this almost mindless pursuit of carnal desires takes up as much of the novella as the testimonies and accounts of atrocities. The incongruities between the two give rise to some pungent black humor. Yet another dimension is provided by the "big brother" political atmosphere; the country is still ruled by the military junta that perpetrated the mayhem that is the subject of the report, and the narrator's initial feeling of amorphous uneasiness rapidly develops into full-blown paranoia. (Even so, the novella, at its caustic end, exemplifies the adage that even paranoids have enemies.) "Senselessness" is operative on several different levels, in several different contexts.

The writing consists of lengthy, intricately constructed, even convoluted, sentences. Reportedly, Castellanos Moya's prose has been heavily influenced by that of Thomas Bernhard. While the convoluted writing demands from the reader constant attention, it never becomes impenetrably dense; it certainly was easier for me to read than my several attempts at Bernhard. (By the way, the title to this review is the end of a brilliant two-and-a-half page sentence about the civil registrar of Totonicapan who had refused to hand over his register of local villagers to the army, for which offense he was tortured and ultimately dispatched by a machete blow which cleft his head longitudinally. To quote a little more of the conclusion to the sentence: "* * * 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.")

Before stumbling upon SENSELESSNESS, I was not familiar with Horacio Castellanos Moya. He was born in Honduras (in 1957), but when he was very young his family moved to El Salvador, where he grew up and which he left, a political exile, at age 22. Since then he has lived in many countries working as an author and journalist. Currently he teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a friend and correspondent of Roberto Bolano, and, based on SENSELESSNESS and what I have read of Bolano, Castellanos Moya is easily of the same rank as a writer of creative, socially and politically engaged fiction.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great read, June 22, 2008

By 

MJ See (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Senselessness (Paperback)

.......fearless and heartbreaking. I couldn't put this book down. The writing style, with its long beautiful sentences that are anything but languorous, and the setting are exotic but it's easy to connect to because the characters are so well thought out and so universally human. From the first sentence, you immediately enter into the main character's head, a sometimes shocking reality, and the book just clips along and keeps you in suspense until the very last paragraph.