∎ Download Free Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya Katherine Silver 9780811217071 Books

Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya Katherine Silver 9780811217071 Books

Download As PDF : Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya Katherine Silver 9780811217071 Books

Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya Katherine Silver 9780811217071 Books

The nameless narrator of SENSELESSNESS is engaged to copyedit an 1,100-page manuscript collecting and analyzing the oral eyewitness testimonies to the slaughter, torture, and rape of indigenous peoples of a Central American country (not identified, but surely Guatemala) by governmental forces during a civil war. Midway through his work, he resolves not to try to turn any of the testimonies into a novel, "because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples." Yet that is exactly what Castellanos Moya has done in SENSELESSNESS.

The testimonies, which are scattered throughout this novella, are horrendous and gruesome, repulsive yet riveting. They tell of machete-butcherings of entire families, torture, emasculation, and gang-rape. The narrator becomes haunted and possessed by stray sentences from the testimonies. For example, "The pigs they are eating him, they are picking over his bones"; "There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them"; and "I am not complete in the mind". Sadly, those extracts are NOT fictitious. They and others from the novella are from actual testimonies that Castellanos Moya reviewed. Woven into the warp and woof of the novella, they make for extraordinarily powerful fiction.

But what elevates SENSELESSNESS to another plane is that it is not solely an account of horror and mayhem. It also deals with the effort to go on with life as if such barbarity did not, and does not, happen. Outside work on the project, the narrator pursues the life of a hip, cosmopolitan, young professional -- parties, bars, restaurants, and skirt-chasing. Indeed, this almost mindless pursuit of carnal desires takes up as much of the novella as the testimonies and accounts of atrocities. The incongruities between the two give rise to some pungent black humor. Yet another dimension is provided by the "big brother" political atmosphere; the country is still ruled by the military junta that perpetrated the mayhem that is the subject of the report, and the narrator's initial feeling of amorphous uneasiness rapidly develops into full-blown paranoia. (Even so, the novella, at its caustic end, exemplifies the adage that even paranoids have enemies.) "Senselessness" is operative on several different levels, in several different contexts.

The writing consists of lengthy, intricately constructed, even convoluted, sentences. Reportedly, Castellanos Moya's prose has been heavily influenced by that of Thomas Bernhard. While the convoluted writing demands from the reader constant attention, it never becomes impenetrably dense; it certainly was easier for me to read than my several attempts at Bernhard. (By the way, the title to this review is the end of a brilliant two-and-a-half page sentence about the civil registrar of Totonicapan who had refused to hand over his register of local villagers to the army, for which offense he was tortured and ultimately dispatched by a machete blow which cleft his head longitudinally. To quote a little more of the conclusion to the sentence: "* * * I must admit without any bias, the instant that blow fell the restless soul of the civil registrar would start to tell his story, always with the fingerless palms of his hands pressing together the two halves of his head to keep his brains in place, for I am not a total stranger to magical realism.")

Before stumbling upon SENSELESSNESS, I was not familiar with Horacio Castellanos Moya. He was born in Honduras (in 1957), but when he was very young his family moved to El Salvador, where he grew up and which he left, a political exile, at age 22. Since then he has lived in many countries working as an author and journalist. Currently he teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a friend and correspondent of Roberto Bolano, and, based on SENSELESSNESS and what I have read of Bolano, Castellanos Moya is easily of the same rank as a writer of creative, socially and politically engaged fiction.


Tags : Senselessness [Horacio Castellanos Moya, Katherine Silver] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <strong>A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: <em>Senselessness</em>,Horacio Castellanos Moya, Katherine Silver,Senselessness,New Directions,0811217078,Catholic Church,Indians, Treatment of - Latin America,Central America,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Literary,GENERAL,General Adult,Honduras,Literary,Literature: Texts,United States

Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya Katherine Silver 9780811217071 Books Reviews

An unnamed writer is hired by the human rights office of the Catholic Church of an unnamed Central American country to edit and proofread eleven hundred pages of testimony--"the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas." During the 1970s and 1980s, over a hundred thousand indigenous Mayan people were killed and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and now, many years later, the human rights office at the cathedral plans to publish the survivors' testimonies for the first time. Telling his story in the first person, the writer/editor, an atheist, confesses that he is concerned about the relationship between some members of the church hierarchy and members of the army, and he trusts no one.

The editor, whose stream-of-consciousness opinions and emotional reactions involve the reader from the outset, becomes a true character here, his sardonic humor vying for attention with his paranoia about being pursued by the army, his relentless sexual fantasies and attempted seductions, and his commentary about particularly memorable and poetic sentences that he finds in the testimonies of the uneducated survivors. Self-conscious in the extreme, he constantly worries about what people think of him, especially women, at the same time that, ironically, he imagines writing a novel about a brave civil registrar who dies to protect the truth.

As he reads the dramatic and heart-rending testimonies, he gradually becomes more and more involved with the stories, his increasing emotional involvement taking its toll. The raw sexuality and violence of the documents parallels, on a smaller scale, the sexual encounters in his private life and the potential for violence there, and the contrast of scale illustrates the horrors of the massacres through the irony. His behavior after escaping the city to a Catholic retreat to complete his work in seclusion, is irrational and suggests he has become as "senseless" as the violence which has torn the country.

Author Horacio Castellanos Moya, whose own human rights work in Honduras led to his exile, creates a powerful work of fiction about the horrendous brutality in a "neighboring country," in which the Cakchiquel, Quiche, and Mam Indians are massacred, giving enough detail to shock the reader into questioning how human beings could commit these atrocities and enjoy the bloodshed in the process. At the same time, however, Castellanos Moya is aware of the limits on violence that a reader can comprehend before "tuning out," a rare quality which he exploits by juxtaposing some of the worst details of torture against images of the absurdities in the speaker's personal life. This provides a kind of mordant humor, which allows the reader to recover enough equilibrium to tackle the next set of revelations with a fresh sense of outrage. And as the fictional speaker becomes more and more in fear of his life, his behavior becomes a kind of testimony of its own--the fear generated by a powerful elite which has yet to be punished. Mary Whipple
The nameless narrator of SENSELESSNESS is engaged to copyedit an 1,100-page manuscript collecting and analyzing the oral eyewitness testimonies to the slaughter, torture, and rape of indigenous peoples of a Central American country (not identified, but surely Guatemala) by governmental forces during a civil war. Midway through his work, he resolves not to try to turn any of the testimonies into a novel, "because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples." Yet that is exactly what Castellanos Moya has done in SENSELESSNESS.

The testimonies, which are scattered throughout this novella, are horrendous and gruesome, repulsive yet riveting. They tell of machete-butcherings of entire families, torture, emasculation, and gang-rape. The narrator becomes haunted and possessed by stray sentences from the testimonies. For example, "The pigs they are eating him, they are picking over his bones"; "There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them"; and "I am not complete in the mind". Sadly, those extracts are NOT fictitious. They and others from the novella are from actual testimonies that Castellanos Moya reviewed. Woven into the warp and woof of the novella, they make for extraordinarily powerful fiction.

But what elevates SENSELESSNESS to another plane is that it is not solely an account of horror and mayhem. It also deals with the effort to go on with life as if such barbarity did not, and does not, happen. Outside work on the project, the narrator pursues the life of a hip, cosmopolitan, young professional -- parties, bars, restaurants, and skirt-chasing. Indeed, this almost mindless pursuit of carnal desires takes up as much of the novella as the testimonies and accounts of atrocities. The incongruities between the two give rise to some pungent black humor. Yet another dimension is provided by the "big brother" political atmosphere; the country is still ruled by the military junta that perpetrated the mayhem that is the subject of the report, and the narrator's initial feeling of amorphous uneasiness rapidly develops into full-blown paranoia. (Even so, the novella, at its caustic end, exemplifies the adage that even paranoids have enemies.) "Senselessness" is operative on several different levels, in several different contexts.

The writing consists of lengthy, intricately constructed, even convoluted, sentences. Reportedly, Castellanos Moya's prose has been heavily influenced by that of Thomas Bernhard. While the convoluted writing demands from the reader constant attention, it never becomes impenetrably dense; it certainly was easier for me to read than my several attempts at Bernhard. (By the way, the title to this review is the end of a brilliant two-and-a-half page sentence about the civil registrar of Totonicapan who had refused to hand over his register of local villagers to the army, for which offense he was tortured and ultimately dispatched by a machete blow which cleft his head longitudinally. To quote a little more of the conclusion to the sentence "* * * I must admit without any bias, the instant that blow fell the restless soul of the civil registrar would start to tell his story, always with the fingerless palms of his hands pressing together the two halves of his head to keep his brains in place, for I am not a total stranger to magical realism.")

Before stumbling upon SENSELESSNESS, I was not familiar with Horacio Castellanos Moya. He was born in Honduras (in 1957), but when he was very young his family moved to El Salvador, where he grew up and which he left, a political exile, at age 22. Since then he has lived in many countries working as an author and journalist. Currently he teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a friend and correspondent of Roberto Bolano, and, based on SENSELESSNESS and what I have read of Bolano, Castellanos Moya is easily of the same rank as a writer of creative, socially and politically engaged fiction.