Senselessness [Paperback]

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 dangerafter all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.I recommend Horacio Castellanos Moyas fantasticIts success hinges on the acerbically comic, darkly spitting voice of the narrator.Like Kafka on amphetamines.The only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time.A brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials.He has put El Salvador on the literary map.Like Kafka, Moya keeps an ironic eye trained on the way in which bureaucracies become corollaries of dictatorships&.His leaps from absurdity to terror and back again are like something out ofA Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: