Senselessness

Senselessness is one of those short, run-on novels that seems to have been written in one breath—a compulsively readable account of one man’s descent into panic, paranoia and terror. The book’s narrator, a hapless copy editor, arrives in an unnamed Central American country in order to “manicure” an exhaustive, 1,100-page report on the military’s abuses of the indigenous population. It’s a harrowing text that rings out with strange, haunting phrases of testimony that slowly take on a life of their own. “I am not complete in the mind,” repeats one villager, after watching his children be mutilated; “If I die, I know not who will bury me,” bemoans another man who’s seen his entire family massacred. Soon, the document’s voices begin to mingle with a more general air of menace in the country. After all, many of the military’s guiltiest figures are still in power—and why would they permit such a damning report to be published, anyway? (Clearly, these are more than the usual pressures a copy editor is expected to endure.)

Moya, who himself was forced into exile from El Salvador, writes long, loping sentences, creating a raving monologue burning with a neurotic intensity and flashes of dark humor. His narrator stumbles in and out of cheesy mariachi bars; his one sexual encounter, with a hot Spanish coworker, goes comically awry. Hovering throughout is a history of violence. There are echoes here of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, as well as Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder, which revolves around real-life truth commissions in Guatemala. Senselessness is a welcome, eye-opening addition to this new literature of the Latin American nightmare.