Senselessness
SynopsisPlot
A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100-page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell, the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger―after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.
Story
About this book
In Senselessness, a hard-drinking writer takes a job proofreading a 1,100-page report for the Catholic Church, an institution he despises. The document records the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, and it collects the testimonies of survivors. His task is simply to tidy the prose, but the phrasing of the witnesses begins to hold his attention.
Two pressures close in as the work continues. The survivors' sentences, plain and strange at once, take on the force of poetry for him and press on his already fragile composure. At the same time he understands that the generals responsible for the killings still run this unnamed Latin American country, which makes the report itself a dangerous object to be handling.
Horacio Castellanos Moya is a Salvadoran writer, and Senselessness was his first book to appear in English; the translation received a Rainmaker Translation Grant from the Black Mountain Institute. The novel keeps its setting deliberately unnamed, while the material it describes, an ecclesiastical human rights report built from indigenous testimony, belongs to a documented pattern in Central American history. Humor and obscenity run alongside the horror throughout.
