A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute: Senselessness, acclaimed Salvadoran author Horacio Castallanos Moya's astounding debut in English, explores horror with hilarity and electrifying panache. 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.

Senselessness

Literature & Fiction

Castellanos Moya, Horacio

Contemporary

New Directions

Salvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her―but who’s that in the mirror? Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator―female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable―paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse. Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness was acclaimed “an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art” (Village Voice) and “a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials” (Russell Banks).

The She-Devil in the Mirror

Literary

Castellanos Moya’s most thrilling book to date, about the senselessness of tyranny. The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Herna´ndez Marti´nez ― known as the Warlock ― who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Hayde´e Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator’s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Hayde´e’s political awakening in diary entries and Clemente’s frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. Tyrant Memory ― sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny ― is an unforgettable incarnation of a coun- try’s history in the destiny of one family.

Tyrant Memory

Humor & Satire

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador.
High-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home at the tail end of El Salvador's long civil war.
Is the plan a dream or a nightmare?
Is he courageous, foolhardy, or just plain dumb?
Is the bubbling brew of horrors and threats actual or imagined?
After he seeks relief for liver pain through hypnosis (while drinking more than ever, despite the treatments), his few impulse-control mechanisms rapidly dissolve, and reality only rarely intrudes on his cogitations. Harebrained murder plots, half-mad arguments, hysterical rants: the narrative escalates at a maniacal pace, infused with Horacio Castellanos Moya's uniquely outlandish and acerbic sense of humor.

The Dream of My Return

The 1997 novel that put Horacio Castellanos Moya on the map, now published for the first time in English An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling his tale and ranting against everything his country has to offer. Written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard, Revulsion was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolano called Revulsion Castellanos Moya’s darkest book and perhaps his best: “A parody of certain works by Bernhard and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud.”

Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador

United States

La sirvienta y el luchador (Andanzas) (Spanish Edition)

Planeta Publishing

En 1991, Erasmo Aragon vive en Mexico, donde trabaja como periodista, y esta apunto de regresar a El Salvador para emprender una nueva vida y participar en la fundacion de una revista, un proyecto que le entusiasma dado que las conversaciones entre el Gobierno y la guerrilla presagian una paz cercana. Erasmo busca tambien en ese retorno al que considera su pais natal una via de escape a su cada vez mas tormentosa relacion con Eva, con quien tiene una hija. Antes de partir, acude desesperado a la consulta del doctor Alvarado con la esperanza de que pueda aliviarle unos terribles dolores estomacales. El medico lo somete a varias sesiones de hipnosis para liberarlo del estres que le provoca su dolencia. Pero el bienestar que al principio le causan esas sesiones se convierte en ob-sesion, pues no recuerda nada de lo que puede haberle revelado al doctor, y porque de pronto revive tragicos episodios de su vida.

El sueño del retorno (Andanzas) (Spanish Edition)

El libro más emblemático y controvertido de Castellanos Moya.Seleccionado por Babelia entre los 100 mejores libros de los últimos 25 años.El asco, una de las novelas más celebradas de Horacio Castellanos Moya, es sin duda la más controvertida de toda su producción y aquella por la que los lectores de su país le recordarán siempre. En sus páginas, el autor se propuso «hacer una demolición cultural y política de San Salvador, al igual que Thomas Bernhard la había hecho de Salzburgo», y el resultado es una novela extraordinariamente incisiva y mordaz, un ajuste de cuentas y una crítica feroz a su país, por la que recibió amenazas de muerte que lo forzaron a emprender el camino del exilio. Tras la reciente muerte de su madre, el profesor Edgardo Vega regresa a El Salvador después de dieciocho años de exilio en Canadá. Para Vega, retornar a su país natal significa tener que enfrentarse a un país que le resulta despreciable, repulsivo e ignorante, un lugar que solo es capaz de provocarle náuseas y el más alto grado de ansiedad. Todo esto le cuenta Vega a Moya, un antiguo compañero de escuela, y llega a nosotros en la forma de un monólogo torrencial en el que el profesor arremete contra todo y contra todos, en una crítica feroz y despiadada de la que no se salva nada ni nadie, ni siquiera su propia familia.  ENGLISH DESCRIPTION  Castellanos Moya’s most emblematic and controversial book.  Selected by Babelia among the 100 best books of the last 25 years.   Revulsion, one of Castellanos Moya’s most celebrated novels is undoubtedly the most controversial of his works, and one for which readers in his country will always remember him. It is written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard. The result is an extraordinarily incisive and scathing novel, a settling of accounts, and a fierce criticism of his country; a work for which he received death threats that forced him into exile.   Due to his mother’s passing, professor Edgardo Vega returns to El Salvador from an 18-year exile in Canada. For Vega, returning to his native country means having to face a despicable, repulsive, and ignorant country, a place that gives him great anxiety and nausea. He confides all of this to Moya, an old classmate, and is offered to the reader in the form of a torrential monologue in which Vega attacks everything and everyone, in a fierce and ruthless criticism from which not even his family is excluded.   Roberto Bolaño called Revulsion “Castellanos Moya’s darkest book and perhaps his best. A parody of certain works by Bernhard, and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud.”

El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador / Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (Spanish Edition)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Literatura Random House

El debut literario de Horacio Castellanos Moya que narra la degradación de los izquierdistas que participaron en la revolución salvadoreña. Las turbulentas muertes de los dos principales líderes del frente revolucionario salvadoreño durante los llamados «sucesos de abril» de 1983, han fracturado los cimientos del Partido. Entre las voces disidentes hay intelectuales y artistas, como es el caso de Juan Carlos, huido de El Salvador e instalado en Ciudad de México a comienzos de 1984, donde espera conseguir que Canadá le acepte como refugiado político. Junto a Juan Carlos confluyen en el limbo que es Ciudad de México un elenco de personajes marcados por la guerra civil salvadoreña: un joven exguerrillero que huyó de la represión y anhela reincorporarse a la lucha armada, un periodista argentino que tuvo que huir de la dictadura militar de su país y sueña con escribir el gran libro sobre la revolución centroamericana y un músico que abanderó el mensaje revolucionario en el exilio y malvive carcomido por la culpabilidad y los recuerdos. A través del presente y el pasado de sus protagonistas y de las muertes de los guerrilleros Mélida Anaya Montes, Salvador Cayetano Carpio y Roque Dalton, esta novela impresionante da buena cuenta de la degradación de los izquierdistas, así como de la diáspora sin tregua que el conflicto originó y que es, en definitiva, una de las secuelas de cualquier guerra. La diáspora, debut literario de Horacio Castellanos Moya, se publica por primera vez fuera de El Salvador en una edición revisada por el propio autor.ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONHoracio Castellanos Moya’s literary debut which narrates the downfall of the Left who took part in the Salvadoran revolution.The tempestuous deaths of the Salvadoran Revolutionary Front’s two main leaders in April 1983 shattered the Party’s foundations. Among the dissident voices are intellectuals and artists like Juan Carlos who fled to Mexico City in early 1984, and where he waits for Canada’s decision to accept him as a political refugee.Alongside Juan Carlos and in the same Mexico City limbo, we see various other characters marked by the Salvadoran civil war: a young ex-guerrilla who fled the repression, an Argentine journalist who wants to write a book about the conflict, and a musician who supported the revolutionary propaganda from exile and now lives haunted by the guilt.Through the protagonists’ past and their current lives, along with the deaths of three guerrillas like Melida Anaya Montes, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, and Roque Dalton, this remarkable novel gives a great account of the Left’s downfall, and also of the ongoing diaspora created by the armed conflict.

La diáspora / Diaspora (Spanish Edition)

La investigación del perturbador asesinato de una mujer de clase burguesa deja entrever la corrupción y la impunidad extendida en la sociedad salvadoreña.\n«Castellanos Moya es una figura estelar en el todavía en marcha segundo boom de la literatura latinoamericana.» -The New York Review of Books\nEl desconcertante homicidio de Olga María, una mujer de clase alta y madre de familia, deja conmocionada a la sociedad salvadoreña. Su mejor amiga no concibe que alguien pueda haber asesinado -a sangre fría, delante de sus dos hijas pequeñas y en su propia casa- a esta mujer honesta y de reputación intachable. Ante la incompetencia policial y la presión de la prensa, será la amiga misma quien intente resolver tan terrible crimen. Su monólogo delirante y atormentado arrastrará al lector a un torrente de hipótesis y descubrimientos que desvelarán los secretos de la vida íntima y secreta de la víctima y la podredumbre social y política de la clase gobernante en El Salvador, un país carcomido por la pasada guerra.\nCon su habitual estilo contundente y depurado, Castellanos Moya nos brinda -a través de la angustiada voz en primera persona de una protagonista que no da tregua al lector- una novela trepidante que, más allá de representar una denuncia feroz de los males que azotan Latinoamérica, es un thriller político que bebe de lo mejor del género negro y detectivesco.\nENGLISH DESCRIPTION\nSalvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her―but who’s that in the mirror?\nLaura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator―female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable―paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.\nCastellanos Moya’s Senselessness was acclaimed “an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art” (Village Voice) and “a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials” (Russell Banks).

La diabla en el espejo / The She-Devil in the Mirror (Spanish Edition)

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