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For obvious reasons, the title Senselessness (Insensatez, 2004; tr. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver) reminded me of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness, a book about a young Hungarian boy who becomes a prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Senselessness, in part, contains the chronicles of a population that was tortured and nearly eliminated. Castellanos Moya’s book and Kertész’s book are very different, but both remind us just how terrible and violent our recent history is. And each is written by fantastic writers.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The book begins when our narrator recites this line: “I am not complete in the mind.” The narrator highlights this line on his first day at his new job. The narrator is an author, like Castellanos Moya. And, like Castellanos Moya, he was forced to leave his country because of something he wrote. In this case, our narrator said that El Salvador was the first Latin American country to have an African President (by which he meant the ruler’s “dictatorial attitude,” not his race). To get by, the narrator has accepted a job from a friend. The job, which much to his distaste puts him in the service of the Catholic Church (he is a “depraved atheist”), is to edit ”one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages” that document “the genocide perpetrated by this country’s army against the unarmed indigenous population.” Though the book does not state it explicitly, “this country” is Guatemala. The lengthy report, several of the groups of people, and several of the violent events that occur in the book are part of Guatemalan history in the 1970s and 1980s.
Our narrator is a strange individual. He knew this job would be dangerous, yet he came almost on impulse. The people who committed the genocide are still very much in power, and now he is playing a role in ensuring ”that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure.” The line of testimony that he highlighted – ”I am not complete in the mind” – strikes him as a perfect statement about himself. This simple statement seems to explain why he is doing what he is doing, a discovery he does not necessarily want to make:
which led me to an even worse conclusion, even more perturbing, and this was that only somebody completely out of his mind would be willing to move to a foreign country whose population was not complete in the mind to perform a task that consisted precisely of copyediting an extensive report of one thousand one hundred pages that documents the hundreds of massacres and proves the general perturbation.
He becomes increasingly paranoid. He was alcoholic and sex-obsessed before (our narrator is not the do-gooder you’d think would sign-up for this type of work), but now these are methods for evading emotion. The detail gives the book an unpleasant texture; however, any discomfort we may feel is well put.
Castellanos Moya emphasizes this evasion and paranoia with his style. The narrator speaks in long, rambling sentences (wonderfully translated by Katherine Silver) that search for an explanation where there is none – which is part of the point. I have pulled only one larger quote from this book because it was hard to find one that didn’t run, necessarily, for line after line after line. I was tempted to put at least one that went on for over a page, but, as you can see, I didn’t give in to that temptation; I believe the book is probably cumulative, so any such quote wouldn’t mean much out of context anyway. But in context, we get a ride through the narrator’s perturbed mind that is as thrilling as it is disturbing.
Is there an explanation for why the narrator – despite the distaste he has for his employer, despite the danger of being found by the military rulers, despite his own lack of attachment and ample cynicism – continues to edit these testimonies? If there is, it must be in the testimonies themselves. The lines that Castellanos Moya includes in this book (which, like the report, are real) are obviously not spoken by native speakers — the syntax is all off, the word choice is unfamiliar — yet these lines are poetic in the way they compact years of terror and violence into five or six words in a phrase. They haunt the narrator as he marvels at their perfection and trembles at their significance. He is pulled into the book even though it, combined with his appropriate terror, is driving him to paranoia.
Senselessness is a fascinating book. It’s thoroughly unpleasant in the best sense. As he did in The She-Devil in the Mirror, Castellanos Moya has created a paranoid narrator we can’t help but follow to the end. While I probably enjoyed reading She-Devil more for its story, Senselessness contains a great deal more gravity and is sticking with me still. It is worth more attention.
Have you ever started a book thinking that the title and the blurbs disclosed too much? That though it still promises to be well written and interesting, you wish the ending hadn’t been alluded to? That’s how I felt when I started The She-Devil in the Mirror (La Diabola [sic: Diabla??] en el Espejo, 2000; tr. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, 2009). It’s a murder mystery monologue by a “fabulously unreliable” narrator, the “she-devil.” I was very wrong to think that I knew how this book would play out. As I’ve found in many of New Directions’ publications, the subject is never quite so easy to pin down.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
As I said above, this is a murder mystery delivered as a kind of dramatic monologue, like, for example, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Though I liked The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I think She-Devil used the device to much greater effect. In other words, I thought The Reluctant Fundamentalist had a great story and great bits about identity and emotion, but the monologue felt forced and more like a gimmick in the end, though I do understand why it was used; She-Devil, on the other hand, never felt gimmicky. And in the end, the device effects quite an illuminating surprise. Here’s how it begins:
How could such a tragedy have happened, my dear? I just spent the whole morning with Olga María at her boutique at the the Villa Españolas Mall, she had to check on a special order. I still can’t believe it; it’s like a nightmare.
Our narrator, that “fantastically unreliable” narrator, is Laura Rivera, a thirty year old woman and apparently the best friend of the murdered Olga María — at least, that is what she says, and we have no reason to doubt her, really. Something I didn’t expect from this Latin American novel is that Laura is upper class: “I’ve had only BMWs for about twelve years now, ever since papa gave me my first car when I turned eighteen and entered the university.” Most of the Latin American books I’ve read lately have dealt largely with the commoner, and they’ve been largely political because of that perspective. This one has a different feel because of the different perspective, though the political elements are present. This is post-civil war San Salvador, and it’s effects have drifted out into the populous, even those who are in many ways oblivious, like Laura.
Laura is in a state of shock as the book begins; after all, she has just found her that her best friend has just been murdered. However, due to the gossipy feel of her monologue, we get the feeling that the shock is just as much the effect of her having been with her best friend only hours before. It’s the proximity to death, in other words. The indignity she shows feels feigned. However, in Laura’s defense, she is genuinely shocked about the manner of the death. Olga María was killed in cold blood, in her own living room, in front of her young children. There is no apparent motive:
That’s when little Olga told me about the murderer and how all he wanteed was to kill Olga María: she told him to take the car, whatever he wanted, just don’t hurt them, especially not the girls; but he didn’t want anything, he just wanted to kill her, like someone had sent him, like he’d been given explicit insructions. Something smells rotten, because Olga María couldn’t have any enemies.
The bulk of the book is Laura’s attempts to rationalize the murder, to try to find something in the little she knows about Olga María’s past that could explain the death. She comes up with some pretty good theories, as outlandish as they may at first seem. The outlandishness is part of the point. But, Laura says, “I’m not paranoid.”
There is so much to admire in this book. Castellanos Moya’s narrator is wonderfully rendered. We can feel just how out of touch she is as she talks about the past or even the murder but then gets hung up on what someone is wearing. She’s a fan of the melodramatic Brazilian telenovelas, and we’re not sure how much of what she’s saying is based on ideas and emotions shes learned from these pastimes. But it’s not just this aspect of Laura’s personality that is well done. I thought this next paragraph was particularly enlightening:
After I hung up, after all the excitement of having solved the case, I got paralyzed. It was like I saw a blinding light. I felt this terrible dread, as if my discovery, that I’d solved the case, could cost me my life. I didn’t want to keep thinking. So, instead, I called Doña Olga.
Here’s Laura – maybe paranoid, maybe not; maybe correct about her theory, maybe not — avoiding her own ideas by calling Olga María’s mother. This is a great mystery novel, but more than that, it is a great look at how the paranoia permeating post-conflict societies,even those purporting to be democratic, can influence even those who are, for the most part, untouched and out-of-touch. I had no idea going in just how powerful this book would be.
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