Senselessness
By Horacio Castellanos Moya; Katherine Silver (Translator)
(New Directions Publishing Corporation, Paperback, 9780811217071, 142pp.)
Publication Date: May 2008
Categories: Literary
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Description
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.
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