senselessness (horacio castellanos moya, tr. katherine silver)

This is one of the least comfortable reads you are likely to come across. A writer accepts the job of rewriting a report on human rights abuses in an unnamed Central American country. He works in an office in the cathedral complex, in the centre of the city. He complains that he’s not being paid enough. He complains there aren’t any good looking women around. He finds two good looking Spanish women and sleeps with one of them. Then he gets scared because the woman he sleeps with has a (Uruguayan) military boyfriend, who is arriving any day. He is haunted by phrases from the report he is working on. He goes mad. It’s all over in a flash. Is the author mocking the process of compiling human rights reports? Is he trying to equate the feckless writer with the feckless and dangerous men who have committed these crimes? The novel’s satirical intentions walk a Swiftian line and the discomfort this engenders is, one imagines, the object of the exercise.