Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of the writers Iowa City is luckiest to have. He was born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, where he lived and worked for many years — in addition to Mexico City, his address during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s — as a journalist and influential newspaper editor.
Starting in 1997, his provocative, gleeful, angry political fiction earned him death threats and a second helping of political exile. After living everywhere else, Castellanos Moya eventually settled in Iowa City, where he has taught at the University of Iowa for more than a decade.
The immediate culprit for the death threats was the novel El asco, later published in English under the title Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Bernhard, the Austrian novelist famous for his narrators’ volcanic rants, was derided in his day as a Nestbeschmutzer: the impolite German word for someone who defiles their own nest, the “nest” in his case being Austria. Note how the metaphor of the nest naturalizes nationality. Under its terms, a nation can lay a quasi-biological claim on you, with all the authority of a mother bird (or the virile eagles adorning so many flags).
By contrast, Bernhard and Castellanos Moya both transform the beschmutzing of the nest into something like the writer’s sacred duty. In this sense, the frequent pairing of the two writers — which, after all, is Castellanos Moya’s own — is an apt one. But the novels of Castellanos Moya, only some of which adopt the rant form, are not mere reiterations of the achievement of Bernhard, as the comparison might inadvertently suggest. He does his own thing.
Take Senselessness (Insentatez), probably Castellanos Moya’s most celebrated book among Anglophone readers. In Katherine Silver’s energetic translation for New Directions, the novel’s misanthropic narrator agrees to copyedit an 1,100-page human rights report compiled by the Catholic Church in an unnamed Central American country. The report heaps with atrocities from a recent war, described in broken and circular Spanish in the testimonio of the country’s Indigenous witnesses and victims. The narrator, a literary type, is haunted by the stark poetry of their speech. His prolonged absorption in the report causes its obscene violence to share a rail system with his more usual trains of thought: namely, a generalized irritability and the search for casual sex.
The mingling of an individual’s ordinary life with collective historical trauma occurs, in the mind of the narrator, through this short novel’s extremely long, and magnificent, sentences. Read one aloud, and you will experience an analogue to the narrator’s mounting sense of mental suffocation. Here is the first quarter of one especially good sentence, to show what I mean about the fusion of individual and collective:
The first thing I knew about Fátima was that I wanted to lick her all over due to the appetizingly creamy texture and light rosy hue of her skin and her perfect curves pressed into a pair of red-denim jeans and an organdy blouse under which could be descried her seductive belly button as well as a little path of fuzz my eyes began to follow, descending, while she talked about her recent trip to a village in the highlands, where years ago half the population had been slaughtered — initiated by the army but with an enthusiasm that left no room for doubt — by the other half, their fellow citizens, one of the 422 massacres contained in the one thousand one hundred pages that awaited me on the bishop’s desk the following day…
The lascivious “descent” of the narrator’s eyes instigates a mental descent into the past, and into the report’s all-consuming pages. Castellanos Moya is funny, but the cumulative effect of hairpin transitions like this is to dramatize — through the magic of grammar, and a bravura command of clauses — the psychic scrambling and existential burden inflicted by constant exposure to the reality of barbarism.
That burden exists even when the exposure is indirect, as it is here. The narrator is from a neighboring country, and he is processing this particular conflict through words on the page. The condition of indirect bombardment by mediated (but real) violence is even more widespread now than it was in 2004, the year of the novel’s Spanish publication and the year of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. The reading of an 1,100-page written report is an inexact but functional equivalent to the mass consumption of livestreamed war crimes.
After you recover from Senselessness, treat yourself to Castellanos Moya’s earlier, lesser-read, equally short, somewhat lighter, arguably even more unhinged novel, Dance with Snakes (Baile con serpientes). Like Senselessness, this one isn’t short of satirical material, to set the death-threateners to hissing. However, the title is not a metaphor. You will feel all sorts of sensuous things about snakes that you never knew you could feel.
Long may literature make us uncomfortable! Shall it never cease to weird us out!
