Customer Reviews

Senselessness

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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.

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.

.......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.

An unnamed writer is hired by the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed Central American country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony--"the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas." During the 1970s and 1980s, over a hundred thousand indigenous Mayan people were killed and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors' testimonies for the first time. Telling his story in the first person, the writer/editor, an atheist, confesses that he is concerned about the relationship between some members of the church hierarchy and members of the army, and he trusts no one.

The editor, whose stream-of-consciousness opinions and emotional reactions involve the reader from the outset, becomes a true character here, his sardonic humor vying for attention with his paranoia about being pursued by the army, his relentless sexual fantasies and attempted seductions, and his commentary about particularly memorable and poetic sentences that he finds in the testimonies of the uneducated survivors. Self-conscious in the extreme, he constantly worries about what people think of him, especially women, at the same time that, ironically, he imagines writing a novel about a brave civil registrar who dies to protect the truth.

As he reads the dramatic and heart-rending testimonies, he gradually becomes more and more involved with the stories, his increasing emotional involvement taking its toll. The raw sexuality and violence of the documents parallels, on a smaller scale, the sexual encounters in his private life and the potential for violence there, and the contrast of scale illustrates the horrors of the massacres through the irony. His behavior after escaping the city to a Catholic retreat to complete his work in seclusion, is irrational and suggests he has become as "senseless" as the violence which has torn the country.

Author Horacio Castellanos Moya, whose own human rights work in Honduras led to his exile, creates a powerful work of fiction about the horrendous brutality in a "neighboring country," in which the Cakchiquel, Quiche, and Mam Indians are massacred, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could commit these atrocities and enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, Castellanos Moya is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before "tuning out," a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker's personal life. This provides a kind of mordant humor, which allows the reader to recover enough equilibrium to tackle the next set of revelations with a fresh sense of outrage. And as the fictional speaker becomes more and more in fear of his life, his behavior becomes a kind of testimony of its own--the fear generated by a powerful elite which has yet to be punished. Mary Whipple

I've read bleaker, blacker novels than 'Senselessness', and I'm sure I've read others more humorous, but never anything that combined the two so deftly. The result is mesmerizing (I read it in one sitting) - a copyeditor for a document chronicling the abuses against the indigenous peoples of an unidentified Latin American country tumbles into a paranoid spiral that is comically overwrought yet prudent, as the people that perpetrated those abuses remain in power. Meanwhile, the document, which mostly consists of statements from the death squad's victims, deeply affects the unnamed narrator, as the phrases resonate with meaning and poetic grace, and act as a harmonizing commentary on his own life.

Although I'd only heard good things about it, I was initially hesitant to read this book because of its subject matter. Too often, authors (and filmmakers), while attempting to impart the totality of horrific events, actually dull their impact by committing a type of sensory overload - an unrelenting fixation on man's inhumanity to man can desensitize rather than incense, or else it is cumulatively so repellent I find it unreadable or unwatchable. The appallingly appealing 'Senselessness' is within a minority of stories of which I'm aware that intensify their ghastly testimony by emphasizing the struggle to maintain normal human interactions, and the pursuit of normal human desires, amidst an imposed atmosphere of fear and butchery. Whipsawing between the main character's search for women and entertainment, and then back to his copyediting duties, the narrative reveals the silent, fundamental axioms, derived from its violent history, that govern this society; and its roller-coaster delivery makes each new revelation from the primary document as disturbing as the first.

And then there is the humor, which at first may seem out of line or even impossible - but the truth is I found the narrator's first person neurotic observations, and the lengths to which his conclusions lead him, so absurd I laughed out loud more than once. Not that Mr. Moya ever stoops to slapstick - this is satire that highlights the logical outcome of living in the world he describes. What makes it even more effective is I found myself laughing on one page, and cringing on the next.

I thought 'Senselessness' was a nearly flawless novel. Some readers may dislike Mr. Moya's tendency to write in long winding sentences, but to me it only amplified the narrator's state of mind. The book is also full of frank descriptions of a sexual nature and, of course, graphic descriptions of the torture and slaughter carried out by the armed forces of the country. In both cases, I think Mr. Moya is one of those rare novelists who, at least in this case, was able to make full use of language and human behavior in a way that never felt manipulative or sensational.

Time and some distance may alter my opinion, but I would rate 'Senselessness' in my own top ten of the last several years, and easily the best book I've read so far this year (and though I can't compare it to the Spanish, I think it's obvious that Katherine Silver turned in a remarkable translation). I look forward to reading more of Mr. Moya as he becomes available in English editions.

This book made me long for more novellas. The story is well told. The narrator is flawed and charming. The stories from the civil war are terrifying and haunting, yet the writer presents them with enough distance to allow us to wonder about what it is within our human-ness that allows us to treat one another so horrifically. Senselessness delivers a very sad situation, but without being sentimental. And, oddly - and I read this in reviews prior to buying the book, and didn't understand how it could be possible, given the subject matter - Senselessness is presented with great humor. It seems an impossible mix, but for Castellanos Moya it worked incredibly well.

Terrif mordantly scathing black fun, in the shadows of genocide and the worldwide collapse of the Left, this Honduran-born Salvadureno-in-exile's novel set in Central America is fast, a harrowing blast. Sustaining the razor irony and breathtaking pacing is the hilarious stylistic innovation of nearly chapter-long paragraphs.

I came across Mr. Moya's name in the process of trying to discover some new international fiction. Since this was the only book of his in my local library, I decided to give it a chance. I've long enjoyed the works of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, particularly their more politically-themed books. Senselessness shares some similarities with Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch, particularly the sentences that run on for up to a page and the somewhat surreal feel of the narrative. Basically, the story is told in the first person by a guy who goes to a fictional Central American country for a temporary job. His job is to edit a massive report chronicling the atrocities committed by the country's army against its indigenous people. From the very beginning, it becomes clear that our narrator might be far too emotionally engaged in his job for his own good. While his job is simply to edit the manuscript and fix grammatical errors, he becomes engrossed in and horrified by the stories he reads. Certain passages become fixed in his mind and can't be dislodged. There is actually a bizarrely hilarious scene when he is at a party and repeats a certain line from a victim's testimony multiple times, making everybody there somewhat uncomfortable. As the narrative progresses, Moya drops a few hints here and there that the narrator might be becoming slightly unhinged, and the narrator relates his feeling of creeping paranoia. Up until the very end the reader isn't certain whether the narrator's paranoia and fears are justified or not.

The narrator has a couple of relationships outside of the office, including with two women who also work on human rights issues. The description of these relationships is quite hilarious at times, but they also feel somewhat disjointed and disconnected from the larger story. Overall, however, I really enjoyed this book and would gladly check out some of Mr. Moya's other works. This is a short book, and if one is focused and not distracted, it can easily be finished in a few hours. But the `not distracted' part is crucial; I really enjoyed the unconventional narrative structure and the long, rambling sentences, but they are really hard to follow if one is distracted!

In Senselessness, Moya takes on a unique narrative perspective, telling the story completely from within the narrators mind. This choice draws the reader in from the start and keeps you questioning as you find yourself identifying with this man, who seems to be slowly slipping into insanity. Though it explores the dynamics of fear, the brutalities of this central american country, and the price of isolation, it is not without a sense of humor. Again, the reader will find himself questioning how a person could laugh when there is so much groteque detail instilled in the novel. The authors use of long sentance structure keeps you reading and truely highlights the setting within the narrators mind. To the end, senselessness is beautifully crafted and incredibly interesting.

This was a fantastic book. What with the stylistic rambling sentences and 1st person perspective you can never be quite sure if what the narrator sees what is real or if his paranoia is really unfounded. I had the chance to speak with Moya personally about his book and he still avoided the question. What I did find interesting is that the one thousand one hundred page report that poisons the mind of the narrator is an actual report that Moya himself edited (albeit not with the same effect) and all the quotes from the report in the novel are actual quotes from the actual report.

Interesting facts aside, this is an enjoyable book. Moya does a fantastic job of taking you down the same paranoid path that his narrator is taking, almost without you noticing. Every time I put it down I was jumpy and paranoid for sometime afterward; it just gets you in that state of mind. Read for too long in one sitting and you'll sync up very well with the narrator and might even start jumping around swinging imaginary babies above your head (read the book). It can be a little vulgar at times (to put it lightly) but the vulgarity is not used excessively, it is used effectively. You can feel what he feels and at times, distinctly smell what he smells. It is not the most descriptive book I've ever read, but certainly one of the most absorbing and captivating.

Keep in mind that this book is almost as factual as it is fiction. His friend Erick, the bishop, and the woman described in the report that he later meets in person are all real people. These elements, even though I didn't know them as I read and only learned them afterward as I talked with Moya, made the novel that much better.

As for whether the narrator's paranoia has any ground or not, Moya says, "He was being watched, but not followed." That doesn't clear too much up, Moya, sir. You have succeeded in keeping me wondering.