beer good
Well-Known Member
It's an important job they've given our nameless narrator, simple but important. In a fragile Mesoamerican democracy (also never named) where people still carry memories and scars of torture chambers and massacres and the people who committed the atrocities have all been pardoned and kept their old positions, the catholic church has hired him to copy edit 1100 pages of testimonies from hundreds of massacres during the recent civil war. Page upon page upon page of the most horrific descriptions, deeply traumatised people talking about how they saw their families chopped to pieces, their neighbours executed, their daughters raped and their sons raping.
A very dark and uneasy comedy, to be sure. It's not the horrors themselves that Moya makes fun of (the book is loosely based on real events). But he lets the quotes get filtered through a narrator who is not only a self-centered chauvinist who's more than a little paranoid, but above all exactly that: a narrator who completely misses the point of his own story. Just like Moya himself (exiled from both Honduras and El Salvador) he's not from this country but from one of the ones next to it, so he's always a little outside both the society and the stories he's supposed to edit. And so he starts treating them as stories. He romanticises, he admires them as works of literature, he makes them a picturesque background for his own heroic tale of himself as he struts around town, tries to pick up young girls, fights with priests and believes himself a subversive and dangerous journalist when he's really more of an Ignatius J Reilly. And the more he submerges himself in the horrible story he's editing and exaggerates his own role in it, the more he becomes convinced that everyone is after him. Which, of course, is ludicrous: he's a nobody, not even his own bosses take him seriously. Except maybe not. Because all of it did happen, and everything isn't safe...
Senselessness is short but sharp, with no easy moral. It seems to deliberately want to force the reader to subvert their own role in it: to rob us of that safe (geographical and psychological) distance between the events of the novel and our own armchair by having a ridiculous narrator who's trying - and failing - to keep a distance to the events of his own novel. He uses every word to constantly question and undermine our attempt to read it as just a black comedy or make easy sense of the relation between fiction and fact. It's not quite a great novel, especially in the way it ends just as it starts to get really good, but it's a bewildering read that will stay with you for some time.
This is, of course, a comedy.
A very dark and uneasy comedy, to be sure. It's not the horrors themselves that Moya makes fun of (the book is loosely based on real events). But he lets the quotes get filtered through a narrator who is not only a self-centered chauvinist who's more than a little paranoid, but above all exactly that: a narrator who completely misses the point of his own story. Just like Moya himself (exiled from both Honduras and El Salvador) he's not from this country but from one of the ones next to it, so he's always a little outside both the society and the stories he's supposed to edit. And so he starts treating them as stories. He romanticises, he admires them as works of literature, he makes them a picturesque background for his own heroic tale of himself as he struts around town, tries to pick up young girls, fights with priests and believes himself a subversive and dangerous journalist when he's really more of an Ignatius J Reilly. And the more he submerges himself in the horrible story he's editing and exaggerates his own role in it, the more he becomes convinced that everyone is after him. Which, of course, is ludicrous: he's a nobody, not even his own bosses take him seriously. Except maybe not. Because all of it did happen, and everything isn't safe...
Senselessness is short but sharp, with no easy moral. It seems to deliberately want to force the reader to subvert their own role in it: to rob us of that safe (geographical and psychological) distance between the events of the novel and our own armchair by having a ridiculous narrator who's trying - and failing - to keep a distance to the events of his own novel. He uses every word to constantly question and undermine our attempt to read it as just a black comedy or make easy sense of the relation between fiction and fact. It's not quite a great novel, especially in the way it ends just as it starts to get really good, but it's a bewildering read that will stay with you for some time.