Horacio Castellanos Moya. Senselessness.(Book review)

Horacio Castellanos Moya. Senselessness. Trans. Katherine Silver. New Directions, 2008. 142 pp. Paper: $15.95.

In Horacio Castellanos Moya's biting English-language debut, a self-described "depraved atheist" agrees to work in an unnamed country (apparently located in Latin America) for a human-rights organization associated with the Catholic Church. His job is to edit a 1,100-page manuscript documenting the tortures suffered by indigenous Indians at the hands of the local military--or, as he puts it, to "make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure" As he reads through the survivors' testimonies, he is moved to record in a notebook snippets of their speech, which he finds highly poetic: "My children say: Mama, my poor Papa where might he be, maybe the sun passes over his bones, maybe the rain and the air, where might he be?" In his spare time, he drinks heavily, relentlessly courts women, and drives himself mad ...