Senselessness - Horacio Castellanos Moya

The cover jacket of Horatio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness poses a question that every one of Moya’s readers ought to ask himself while reading the novella: is its narrator “among the hunted—or is he paranoid? Or is he paranoid and one of the hunted?” This is a question that Moya leaves up to the reader to sort out. The narrator of the story, also the protagonist, is quite a character if nothing else. He is paranoid, mentally unstable, and a bit perverted; but at times one can’t help thinking that he might not be wrong about...

The cover jacket of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness poses a question that every one of Moya’s readers ought to ask himself while reading the novella: is its narrator “among the hunted—or is he paranoid? Or is he paranoid and one of the hunted?” This is a question that Moya leaves up to the reader to sort out.

The narrator of the story, also the protagonist, is quite a character if nothing else. He is paranoid, mentally unstable, and a bit perverted; but at times one can’t help thinking that he might not be wrong about all of his schizophrenic delusions. His episodes lend a dark comedic element to the book and there’s often a pearl of truth to be sifted out from his hysteria.

The story, narrated entirely in the first person, revolves around a recently exiled writer who comes to Guatemala after an old friend convinces him to copyedit a massive report that the Catholic Church is preparing. The report will expose the military government’s role in a campaign of violence that decimated the country’s indigenous population. A great deal of the events that occur in Senselessness are actually fictionalized accounts of real events tied to the story of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi and his Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) report.

Our narrator, from the beginning, shows signs of his instability. There are clues peppered throughout the text that he was, or still is, afflicted with several psychological illnesses. The narrator casually mentions being prescribed medicine from a psychologist, having panic attacks, and feeling generally paranoid. As the reader listens to the writer’s tale unfold, he has no choice but to constantly question whether or not he can rely on the protagonist’s account of his own experiences. While his carousing and attempted womanizing, coupled with his manic rants, often serve as a sort of twisted comic relief, they also force the reader to doubt his credibility as a reliable source.

Moya’s writing will probably seem a bit unfamiliar to many readers because of its unique style. Like many works translated from Spanish into English, Moya’s writing is full of long, run-on sentences that often stretch over multiple pages. In fact, the reader should not be surprised if he finds himself re-reading clauses multiple times. It is easy to lose track of what is happening as Moya’s persona alternates back and forth between narrative, delusion, and digression. However, this technique lends itself to a faster pace of reading than the style most Western writers bring to their work, and it can be read as a reflection of the narrator’s racing mind and psychological instability. Furthermore, Moya’s style, like most Spanish-English translations one will come across, allows his writing to remain liberated from the shackles of traditional English semantics, grammar, and syntax—which leaves Moya free to focus solely on his prose and his craft of storytelling.

From the beginning, just as he sets up clues as to how the reader should perceive his narrator, Moya also sets up a parallel between the narrator and the Guatemalan Indians whose testimonies he is editing. Take this scene the narrator describes towards the end of the book:

Once more I became possessed by that same image, I stood up, I became Lieutenant Octavio Pérez Mena, the official in charge of the unit assigned to the massacre, I returned to the hut of those fucking Indians who would understand the hell that awaited them only when they saw flying through the air the baby I held by the ankles so I could smash its head of tender flesh against the wood beam… I found myself in the middle of the room, shaking, sweating, a little dizzy because of the vertiginous movements of swinging the baby over my head, but at the same time with a feeling of lightness, as if I had taken a load off my back.

Just as the protagonist assumes, if only fleetingly in his imagination, the persona of the author or someone else involved in the testimony that set his imagination running to begin with, he often uses their words, which he internalizes, to narrate his own life story. He continually loses sight of the line separating his own identity from that of the abused indigenous victims, and sometimes even the abominable soldiers, that he reads about. The excerpts he scribbles down shed their original meanings and come to express his own feelings and neurosis—and they do so more frequently and completely as his story, progresses. For instance, take one of the phrases he uses towards the end of the story “The more they killed, the higher they rose up,” This was originally part of an Indian woman’s testimony about her neighbors, however; the protagonist explains to a Swiss bartender after reading him the quote, “in the society I came from, crime constituted the most efficient means of social climbing,” He commandeers possession of the Indian woman’s words to narrate his own life and experiences.

These aren’t the only clues of the narrator’s psychosis, though, his paranoid obsession with the military—particularly with General Octavio Pérez Mena—reveals that he obsesses about particular people as well as occurrences. If one reads carefully, one will see that he never refers to the general without compulsively using his full name and title. Also, he incorrectly imposes the general’s identity on at least two other men that he encounters during the narrative.

The strength of Moya’s story lies in its ending because it forces the reader to question whether all, or at least some, of the inferences he has made about the narrator are correct. While the narrator remains, at the least, neurotic, one can no longer argue with conviction that he is entirely misled by his delusions. One can’t help but think that he may have been right all along—if not in full, at least in part. Senselessness is a tremendous novella that takes advantage of Moya’s unique writing style to tell an intriguing story that easily pulls in its reader. Do not fear, though, because at its moderate length and with Moya’s sparkling prose Senselessness can be read in just one sitting. Of course it doesn’t have to be, but once you gets started, you may find that it’s just too hard to put Moya’s book down.

Horacio Castellanos Moya, El Salvador's leading novelist is currently living/teaching in Pittsburgh, PA and University of Pittsburgh as part of the Asylum City Project for exiled and persecuted writers.