Monday May 25 the holiday

Virginia took a Zyrtek last night and it hit her hard. She slept until 1 pm today. And it was the most beautiful day of the year—brilliant, breezy, sunny, and maybe too cool, but not for me. We got to the docks at 3, walked and then split a lobster salad. $15.95 which is not too bad. Not that much lobster but enough. Half price of Perkins Cove a month ago at Barnacle Billy’s. But they were gouging the early April crowd that day when nothing else was open in the Cove.

Most of the day I spent reading and finishing the astonishing novel Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya. I had first heard of it a year ago on the website The Quarterly Conversation. (See below.) I’m glad in that year I’ve read more of Thomas Bernhard and more about Bernhard because in reading Castellanos Moya I can see more clearly how wide and deep Bernhard’s influence has been. Bernhard perfected a narraive style that is hypnotic and compulsive, rhythmic and obsessive, using repetition and certain other ticks and bits of style that contribute greatly to the power of the stories his works involve us in. I think the work of Spanish writer Javier Marîas is deeply indebted to Bernhard and now in this short central American novel I am sure we see how a young writer has taken Bernhard’s work at put it to new uses in creating a novel that witnesses to the horrors of violence and power in Central America is very unique and even funny ways. Moya’s book is grotesque but in a very readable and enjoyable and comfortable way. It is really funny in places. And it slowly and incredibly surely builds into an amazingly intense portrait of the narrator and of what he is involved with by being hired to edit a huge manuscript that is an official report on years of political abuse, terror and genocide against indigenous peoples in Guatemala. Well, in a country like Guatemala, like Salvador, like Honduras, like Nicaragua. Never specified, perhaps, but the truth clearly told. By–as Dickinson suggests–the telling being very slant. Seems grotesque to even say it—but the book is extremely enjoyable as well as totally chilling and horrifying. You put it down rather speechless with the terrors remembered and with admiration for the power of this writer.

senselessness-by-horacio-castellanos-moya-review

SENSELESSNESS BY HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA

Review by Scott Bryan Wilson

Senselessness, Horacio Castellanos Moya (Katherine Silver, trans.) New Directions. 160pp, $15.95.

Senselessness is the first novel by Honduras-born Horacio Castellanos Moya to be translated into English, and though it’s quite slim, it’s a stunner. Hired by the Catholic church to copyedit an 1,100-page report which details (with gruesome exactitude) military massacres against the indigenous peoples of an unnamed Central American country, the novel’s never-named narrator is swiftly seduced by what he sees as the poetry of the testimonies, as the first line of the novel is the first line of the manuscript that leaves him dumbstruck: “I am not complete in the mind.”