Críticas Magazine

Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (1)

New Directions Publishes Central American Author
August 31, 2008

Few Central American writers are on the U.S. literary world's radars. But this could finally change. In May, New Directions published, Senselessness, the first translation in English of the celebrated Salvadoran writer and journalsit, Horacio Castellanos Moya's work. Translated by Katherines Silver (Tusquets published it in Spanish in 2005 as Insensatez), this publication will be sure to finally give Castellanso Moya the long overdue literary knod of approval from readers in the States.

Above: Horacio Castellanos Moya in leather.

Currently based in Mexico City, he was born in Honduras (to Salvadoran parents who later returned home) and escaped El Salvador's civil war working as a journalist in exile from Canada, Costa Rica, and Spain. Castellanos Moya's grandfather was the president of a nationalist party sorely against liberals. Castellanos Moya later participated in El Salvador's war from 1980 to 1992, as a manager of the guerrillas' propaganda. After three years at war and disenchanted with the guerillas, he went into exile. He actually wrote Senselessness in Guatemala when he arrived there in 2003 (escaping El Salvador again), and his stay there inspired this story of a writer driven insane as he edits a 1,100-page report documenting atrocities committed during Guatemala's three decade civil war. Chilean writer Robert Bolaño was a fan of Castellano Moya's work, known for its paranoia, passion, and long monologues. He's published 8 books: La diáspora (1988), El Asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador (1997), La diabla en el espejo (2000), El arma en el hombre (2001), Donde no estén ustedes (2003) , Insensatez (2005), Desmoronamiento (2006) and books of shorts entitled, El gran masturbador (1993) and Con la congoja de la pasada tormenta (1995). New Directions says it plans to publish a second of his novels sometime in the future. I'll let you know as soon as I do.

Here's the review of Senselessnes from PW:
The first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya's eight fictions to be translated in the U.S., this crushing satire has at its center a feisty young unnamed writer in penurious political exile from an unnamed Latin American country. It opens as he explains the daunting and dangerous freelance job he has taken in an also-unnamed neighboring state: to edit a 1,100-page report prepared for the country's Catholic archdiocese that details the current military regime's torture and murder of thousands of indigenous villagers. The writer despises the Church, but is moved and agitated by the disturbing testimonies of the survivors, at once unspeakable in their horror and unforgettable in their phrasing: the more they killed, the higher they rose up. More or less one long rant, the book's paragraphs go on for pages as the writer gives way to paranoia, and to a sexual longing that his loneliness and powerlessness make nearly unbearable, and that he expresses profanely. It's Moya's genius to make this difficult character seem a product of the same death and disorder documented in the report, as the survivors' voices merge with his own. (May)

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on August 31, 2008 | Comments (1)