Senselessness

From Publishers Weekly
The first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya's eight fictions to be translated in the U.S., this crushing satire has at its center a feisty young unnamed writer in penurious political exile from an unnamed Latin American country. It opens as he explains the daunting and dangerous freelance job he has taken in an also-unnamed neighboring state: to edit a 1,100-page report prepared for the country's Catholic archdiocese that details the current military regime's torture and murder of thousands of indigenous villagers. The writer despises the Church, but is moved and agitated by the disturbing testimonies of the survivors, at once unspeakable in their horror and unforgettable in their phrasing: the more they killed, the higher they rose up. More or less one long rant, the book's paragraphs go on for pages as the writer gives way to paranoia, and to a sexual longing that his loneliness and powerlessness make nearly unbearable, and that he expresses profanely. It's Moya's genius to make this difficult character seem a product of the same death and disorder documented in the report, as the survivors' voices merge with his own. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
This dark and comic novel is a deft exercise in paranoia and the cost of reckoning with an enormity. (San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein) REVIEW: Reader does not experience fright so much as the verbal bounce of...well-sprung prose. (The New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal) REVIEW: A perfect sense of black-comic timing, the book's style is distinctive. (Times Union, Elizabeth Floyd Mair) REVIEW: An innovative and invigoratinly twisted piece of art. (The Village Voice, Jed Lipinski) REVIEW: This masterwork...recently translated seamlessly into English...is an arresting read. (SF Gate, Mauro Javier Cardenas) REVIEW: Manages a brilliant narrative strategy...where everything happens at once. (Ron Slate, Ron Slate) REVIEW: Chaotic, rampaging approach that characterizes almost the entirety of this short, spirited work. (Daily Literary News, Sameer Rahim) REVIEW: A brave and important novel. (Ready Steady Book, Stephen Mitchelmore)