Ever since the sitting president descended that golden escalator just shy of a decade ago, I’ve been asking myself why I read the fiction I read. There’s the temporary escapism, the temporary solace. The still-welcome pleasures of new novels that could have been published any time before 2015. But my admiration is asterisked.
Where are the novels that capture the particular flavor of these “interesting times”? (Spoiler: the flavor is ipecac.) One toothsome example comes from 2004 and, fittingly, beyond our shores: Senselessness, by the Salvadorian writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. The incendiary novella was among a handful that sent him into exile; he’s lived in Mexico, Japan, and Iowa.
An underemployed writer takes a freelance job with the Catholic Church in an unnamed Latin American city. He’s hired to edit the secret interview transcripts of indigenous people who were raped and tortured by the government. Those same authorities believe mere access to the testimonies render him complicit. They’re not wrong. For Moya, there are no bystanders. That includes us.
The narrator is a cynical, hard-drinking, womanizing atheist. His behavior continuously jabs at liberal pieties, and the black humor is alternately seductive and repellent. The prose, too. Page-long sentences. An aversion to paragraph breaks. Repeated phrases that orbit a self-doubting independent clause. (You can spot Moya’s love for Thomas Bernhard from across the room.) This makes for a difficult novel to excerpt. Here’s the first line, translated by Katherine Silver:
I am not complete in the mind, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack, not by any means, but rather the sentence that astonished me more than any other sentence I read that first day on the job, the sentence that most dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages placed on what would be my desk by my friend Erick so I could get some idea of the task that awaited me.
The five iterations of sentence contrast with the scope of the narrator’s project (1100 pages!) and foreshadow his fears of incarceration. But it’s the reported speech we should fixate on. Moya certainly does: Variations of “I am not complete in the mind” appear another sixteen times in the ten-page chapter. We might pause and ask, Who is complete in the mind? Am I? Have I ever been? How much less complete am I than I was before… all this?
The phrase inverts and perverts Rilke’s “You must change your life,” and it speaks to the small part of me that wants the ipecac. The deranging mimesis. All senses, alive.