The Catholic church hires the narrator to copyedit a 1100 page manuscript of interviews containing the memories of hundreds of survivors/witnesses (mostly indigenous peoples) of massacres in Guatemala perpetuated by the armed forces in a conflict between the army and guerrillas. The narrator is terrified and paranoid (and has an overly active imagination), because the government controlling the army is still in power - he believes he is being followed and is suspicious of every stranger he meets. The narrator, speaking in first person, becomes obsessed w/ the survivors (and who can blame him - it'd be almost impossible to keep one's distance from such human attrocities inflicted on innocent people), which is an interesting literary device - the narrator isn't incredibly reliable (paranoid/alcholic/sex obsessed pervert/maybe even slightly crazy), and we the readers are hearing about these horrible violations of human rights from him. The writing style adds to the paranoia - the sentences are dense and tight and run together; some last for an entire page. Further, the beautiful broken Spanish phrases of the survivors begin to consume and replace his own articulation of his situation.His paranoia is ironic in the face of the tortures undergone by the indigeious - they spilled their souls, and all their testimony was being written down, so if anything, they had much more cause for paranoia than the largely selfish solipsistic narrator. In an excellent critial commentary from Scott Esposito, we learn that Moya is less a political writer (b/c he is not trying to explain history or current events, to answer 'why') than a humanist who is exploring the human impact of the political landscape.The writing is definitely rated R.Themes:fragmentationpolitical/exilefunny/darksex/deathobjective reality/human subjectivity Very, very disappointing. The protagonist is copyediting an enormous manuscript that documents atrocities committed against indigenous people. As the book opens, the copyeditor is hypnotized by a sentence he has read: "I am not complete in the mind." It was written by an indigenous man after he had witnessed his family being cut to pieces. The copyeditor knows the things he is reading about, and the ways they are expressed, are too much for him, and he wonders if they are affecting his mind. His inner monologue runs in two and three page-long sentences, as if he is incapable of arriving at a stopping place in his own thinking. He treasures talismanic sentences from the document, which he knows he loves as poetry, even though he knows that may be irresponsible or cowardly.[return][return]A spectacular beginning, conjuring the whole problem of the representation of evil, from Adorno onward, and echoing any number of contemporary writers on the subject of represented evil, from Georges Didi-Huberman to Dave Eggers, W. G. Sebald, and William Vollmann. But then the book becomes a comedy. It's full of supposedly entertaining misunderstandings, explicit sexual escapades, and conventional farce. He sleeps with a woman with smelly feet. He trembles in the presence of his boss. He escapes through a bathroom window. Castellanos Moya is trying to show how he becomes paranoid, thinking he's being followed by the military, and on the last page we learn he might well have been. But that does not make up for the tremendous disappointment of falling so far, so quickly, and with so little hope of recovery, from a sharp peak of existential and literary force to a low swamp of common sex comedy masquerading as trauma. The book is trivial, with one tremendous idea in its first two pages.
Do You like book Senselessness (2004)?
Interesting prose style. Wicked sense of humor. Classic and obvious untrustworthy narrator.
—Skittles
An absolutely amazing novel and a stunning translation.
—bee
