Senselessness

The first of El Salvadoran Horacio Castellano Moya’s books to be translated into English, Senselessness is frankly, one of the best books to be published this year. It’s one of those rare books written in a very specific, very stylized fashion that’s simultaneously accessible and captivating.

I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and ever copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack, not by any means, but rather the sentence that astonished me more than any other sentence I read that first day on the job, the sentence that most dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages placed on what would be my desk by my friend Erick so I could get some idea of the task that awaited me.

His “task” is to edit a 1,100-page report of atrocities committed by the military against the indigenous population in an unnamed Central American country. And he has three months in which to finish.

This isn’t a novel about those atrocities though—at least not directly. Against this backdrop of what’s clearly one of the most disturbing, soul wrenching jobs in the history of editing, the narrator tries to live as normal a life as possible, getting drunk in bars, trying to pick up women, surviving amid the accounts of wretched acts in which he spends his daily life. There are several humorous sections to this book, like the bit about the woman’s stinky feet, which is absolutely hilarious in a viscerally disgusting way.

One of the many reasons this book works is the strange demented beauty of the Indians’ accounts, and the demented obsession the narrator has with the manuscript. He keeps choice quotes in a notebook, and has a tendency to read them aloud at bars to stunned, unappreciative audiences:

You’re a poet, just listen to this beaut, I said before reading the first sentence, taking advantage of the marimba having just ended, and in my best declamatory voice, I read: Their clothes stayed sad . . . and then I observed my buddy, but he in turn looked back at me as if he were waiting, so I immediately read the second sentence in a more commanding tone of voice, if that were possible: The houses they were sad because no people were inside them . . . And then, without waiting, I read the third one: Our houses they burned, our animals they ate, our children they killed, the women, the men, ay! ay! . . . Who will put back all the houses? And I observed him again because by now he must have fathomed those verses that expressed to me all the despair of the massacres, but not to my buddy Toto, more of a landowner than a poet, as I sadly discovered, when I heard him mumble something like “Cool . . . ,” [. . .]

Moya’s cadences and run-on sentences that turn on themselves, that contain digressions upon digressions, that shift suddenly in unexpected directions, are masterfully rendered by Katherine Silver. Anything less than a perfect translation would utterly destroy this book. Each sentence, each paragraph, flows with a beauty that is very cinematic and adds a degree of immediacy to the prose.

And, beyond the art, aside from the Bernhardian rhythms, this style, so eloquently rendered, accurately captures and represents the narrator:

[. . .] this guy with a shaved head who very cunningly segued from this remarks about Vallejo’s poetry and its relationship to indigenous languages to a subtle interrogation about my work at the archdiocese and my friendship with Erick, all packaged neatly into his conversation with me at the kitchen table, not paying any attention to calls to join the group in the living room, where things were picking up, as if the guy had known ahead of time about the psychological problems that afflicated me and that consisted of wanting to tell everything once I’d been encouraged to start talking, down to the hairs and the smells, spill it all out to a point of satiety, compulsively, in a kind of verbal spasm, as if it were an orgiastic race that would culminate in my total abandon, until I was left without secrets, until my interlocutor knew all he wanted to know, in an exhaustive confession after which I would suffer the worst possible backlash.

As the novel progresses, the plot gets a bit darker, a bit more paranoid, a bit more inconclusive, leading to an ending that is pretty startling and made me rethink all that had come before . . . I don’t want to give anything away, but any novel that ends with, “ ‘Everybody’s fucked. Be grateful you left.’ “ is a classic in my book.