The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Reviewed by Tayt Harlin

Untitled document

Trans. Katherine Silver. New Directions, 2008. 142 pp. Paper: $15.95.

In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s biting English-language debut, a self-described “depraved atheist” agrees to work in an unnamed country (apparently located in Latin America) for a human-rights organization associated with the Catholic Church. His job is to edit a 1,100-page manuscript documenting the tortures suffered by indigenous Indians at the hands of the local military—or, as he puts it, to “make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure.” As he reads through the survivors’ testimony, he is moved to record in a notebook snippets of their speech, which he finds highly poetic: “My children say: Mama, my poor Papa where might he be, maybe the sun passes over his bones, maybe the rain and the air, where might he be?” In his spare time, he drinks heavily, relentlessly courts women, and drives himself mad concocting convoluted plots for his own assassination. His tale is broken into episodic chapters consisting of long-winded sentences that stretch across multiple pages, and his cynicism is often turned against him to humorous ends. After bedding a co-worker, he learns from her that she is dating a Uruguayan soldier who happens to be arriving the next day and that they have a pact to tell each other about their “parallel encounters” (i.e., infidelities). “I was experiencing tachycardia,” he explains as she sleeps beside him, “absolutely certain that now I was really in danger.” (He merely ends up with a venereal disease.) He hallucinates that he’s a bloodthirsty general, and the survivors’ voices merge with his own. On the verge of a breakdown, he removes to another anonymous country (resembling Germany). A friend tells him via e-mail that the bishop under whom he’d been working has been assassinated. By the end of this short novel, Castellanos Moya’s title has achieved a fully terrifying meaning.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya Reviewed by Tayt Harlin Untitled document Trans. Katherine Silver. New Directions, 2008. 142 pp. Paper: $15.95. In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s biting English-language debut, a self-described “depraved atheist” agrees to work in an unnamed country (apparently located in Latin America) for a human-rights organization associated with the Catholic Church. His job is to edit a 1,100-page manuscript documenting the tortures suffered by indigenous Indians at the hands of the local military—or, as he puts it, to “make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure.” As he reads through the survivors’ testimony, he is moved to record in a notebook snippets of their speech, which he finds highly poetic: “My children say: Mama, my poor Papa where might he be, maybe the sun passes over his bones, maybe the rain and the air, where might he be?” In his spare time, he drinks heavily, relentlessly courts women, and drives himself mad concocting convoluted plots for his own assassination. His tale is broken into episodic chapters consisting of long-winded sentences that stretch across multiple pages, and his cynicism is often turned against him to humorous ends. After bedding a co-worker, he learns from her that she is dating a Uruguayan soldier who happens to be arriving the next day and that they have a pact to tell each other about their “parallel encounters” (i.e., infidelities). “I was experiencing tachycardia,” he explains as she sleeps beside him, “absolutely certain that now I was really in danger.” (He merely ends up with a venereal disease.) He hallucinates that he’s a bloodthirsty general, and the survivors’ voices merge with his own. On the verge of a breakdown, he removes to another anonymous country (resembling Germany). A friend tells him via e-mail that the bishop under whom he’d been working has been assassinated. By the end of this short novel, Castellanos Moya’s title has achieved a fully terrifying meaning.

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