Senselessness

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 offe

This book made me long for more novellas. The story is well told. The narrator is flawed and charming. The stories from the civil war are terrifying and haunting, yet the writer presents them with enough distance to allow us to wonder about what it is within our human-ness that allows us to treat one another so horrifically. Senselessness delivers a very sad situation, but without being sentimental. And, oddly - and I read this in reviews prior to buying the book, and didn't understand how it could be possible, given the subject matter - Senselessness is presented with great humor. It seems an impossible mix, but for Castellanos Moya it worked incredibly well.

Terrif mordantly scathing black fun, in the shadows of genocide and the worldwide collapse of the Left, this Honduran-born Salvadureno-in-exile's novel set in Central America is fast, a harrowing blast. Sustaining the razor irony and breathtaking pacing is the hilarious stylistic innovation of nearly chapter-long paragraphs.

.......fearless and heartbreaking. I couldn't put this book down. The writing style, with its long beautiful sentences that are anything but languorous, and the setting are exotic but it's easy to connect to because the characters are so well thought out and so universally human. From the first sentence, you immediately enter into the main character's head, a sometimes shocking reality, and the book just clips along and keeps you in suspense until the very last paragraph.

Reading Senselessness is like being sucked into a literary whirlwind-- it pulls you in immediately and intensely, and it never lets go. It is above all else a great read. Fortunately it is short, or you might starve, it is that compelling. And it is very, very funny, though be warned: its humor is always ironic and on-the-edge. Imagine Lenny Bruce writing a Graham Greene novel where the narrator is Lenny Bruce imagined by Graham Greene. Imagine a situation where style itself is politically volatile and editing akin to the erasing of memory and people, literally "rewriting" history (not in the "as if" vein of Saramago, as a counter-argument to the idea of history, but as the accepted standard version at the heart of politics and power.) And finally, consider: the narrator-editor is a loquacious, paranoid, horny, and non-pc yet politically fastidious and sensitive observer. Worried that he himself has become entangled in the violent politics surrounding the book he is editing and possibly about to become the next victim, he is also moved by the stories he edits-- testimonies of indigenous witnesses to atrocities who are not "native" speakers of the language (Spanish) in which they give testimonies, testimonies already professionally "cleaned up" by sociologists and oral historians. So in some ways, the book's problem is to "restore" the truth and speak the unspoken, perhaps the unspeakable, indeed locate a reliable author/authority. Senselessness is a serious piece of post-modern literature that offers the fun and thrills of a roller coaster ride-- total loss of gravity in the hands of a master of panic.