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.

a history of violence [oscar martinez]

Martinez’ book consists of 14 terrible chapters which document life on the wrong side of the tracks in Guatemala and El Salvador. There is no way to do justice to the stories Martinez recounts. The author puts his hand in the lion’s jaws. He describes a world which seems medieval in the way in which power is orchestrated. The powerful’s capacity for brutality is that which defines their power. Souls are just pawns in their games. The logic is that survival, that of the powerful, depends on their capacity to be more brutal than the next man. Martinez talks to the practitioners and the middle men and the victims, those who have escaped with their lives. The things he discovers come straight out of Hieronymous Bosch. 

Why does any of this matter? Martinez’ introduction, as fine a piece of writing as you could hope to come across, addresses this. Why should we, who live in privilege, even take the trouble to learn about the sufferings of those caught up in the Central American drugs wars, or stuck on the immigrant trail? (And here Martinez’ book takes on an even more telling prescience.) Martinez acknowledges that the problems in Guatemala and El Salvador are so extreme that there is no quick solution. However, in his words: “My proposal is that you know what is going on. Because I believe that knowing is different from not knowing. I believe that knowing, especially with people like yours, who know how to wield politics, is the beginning of a solution. I believe… that knowing is what moves the waves. You can be one of the waves.”

Martinez here is addressing a US audience, whose workforce and economy is shaped by Central America labour and immigrants. Who knows what will happen over the course of the next four years. But the book shows us that political structures we believe, in our sheltered states, to have been despatched to the annals of history, continue to thrive. Progress is a myth that belongs to the privileged few. Martinez’ book needs to be read to see what’s on the other side, (pace Cormac McCarthy), all the more so as so much we previously took for granted begins to unravel, We need to be vigilant in our societies to protect them against the terrible forces of unmediated power, which Martinez describes. We also need to do all we can to seek to help those that suffer in those states where the State is too weak to protect its own citizens. Borders melt. The problem on the other side of the fence will get here in the end, if we allow it to fester. 

the she-devil in the mirror [horacio castellanos moya]

Moya's book is a jaunty read, told from the perspective of a young woman immersed in the baroque world of El Salvadorean high society. When a friend of hers is murdered she takes it upon herself to try and discover the real killer, having no confidence in the police chief. The fact that her friend was involved in a series of vapid affairs with a selection of San Salvador's movers and shakers means that the list of potential killers is a long one. It also means that the more Laura, the narrator, mouths off about it, the more danger she places herself in. The fact that she is too blasé and privileged to realise this adds to the sense of impending doom.

The book consists of several breathy chapters, each of them a monologue by Laura to her supposed friend. One can't help suspecting that a great deal of nuance is lost in translation, as she intersperses her theories with observations about society: the malls she meets her friend in; the church; the press, etc. There's nothing sympathetic about Laura and it's clear we're not supposed to like her much. Rather the author is setting out to skewer an elite, to hoist them on their own petard. The book, published in 2000, looks at the way El Salvador, even post-dictatorship, continues to be run by a wealthy, corrupt section of society. There's a quote from Bolano on the front cover of my edition saying Mora is the only writer of his generation who "knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time." I'm not sure She-Devil in the Mirror quite lives up to that billing, maybe his other books do, but nevertheless it's an enjoyable, satirical, eminently readable take on a country which had a long way to go before recovering from the crimes of the late twentieth century.