{"id":4855,"date":"2010-12-03T00:26:05","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T04:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=4855"},"modified":"2016-06-27T14:55:34","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T18:55:34","slug":"horacio-castellanos-moya-senselessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/12\/03\/horacio-castellanos-moya-senselessness\/","title":{"rendered":"Horacio Castellanos Moya: Senselessness<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Senselessness<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Horacio Castellanos Moya (Insensatez<\/em>, 2004)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (2008)<\/span>\r\nNew Directions (2008)<\/span>\r\n142 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
For obvious reasons, the title Senselessness<\/em> reminded me of\u00a0Imre Kert\u00e9sz’s Fatelessness<\/a><\/em>, a book about a young Hungarian boy who becomes a prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.\u00a0 Senselessness<\/em>, in part, contains the chronicles of a population that was tortured and nearly eliminated. Castellanos Moya’s book and Kert\u00e9sz’s book\u00a0are very different,\u00a0but both remind us\u00a0just how terrible and violent our recent\u00a0history is. And each is written by fantastic writers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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\u00a0said that\u00a0El Salvador\u00a0was 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\u00a0puts him in the service of the Catholic Church (he is a “depraved atheist”), is\u00a0to edit\u00a0“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\u00a0are part of Guatemalan history in the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0he is\u00a0playing a role in ensuring\u00a0“that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure<\/em>.”\u00a0The line of testimony that he highlighted —\u00a0“I am not complete in the mind”\u00a0— strikes him as a perfect statement about himself.\u00a0This simple statement seems to explain why he is doing what he is doing, a discovery he does not necessarily want to make:<\/p>\n
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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He becomes increasingly paranoid.\u00a0He 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\u00a0for evading emotion. The detail gives the book an unpleasant texture; however,\u00a0any discomfort we may feel is well put.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0an explanation\u00a0where there is none —\u00a0which 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.<\/p>\n
Is there an explanation for why the narrator —\u00a0despite\u00a0the 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\u00a0—\u00a0continues to edit these testimonies?\u00a0If 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.<\/p>\n
Senselessness<\/em> is a fascinating book. It’s thoroughly unpleasant in the best sense. As he did in The She-Devil in the Mirror<\/a><\/em>, Castellanos Moya has created a paranoid narrator we can’t help but follow to the end.\u00a0While I probably enjoyed reading She-Devil<\/em> more for its story, Senselessness<\/em> contains a great deal\u00a0more gravity and is sticking with me still. It is worth more attention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness<\/em>, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,138],"tags":[880,948,969,579],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-4855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-horacio-castellanos-moya","tag-2000s","tag-948","tag-new-directions","tag-spanish"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Senselessness.jpg?fit=345%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1gj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4855"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18899,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions\/18899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4855"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}