Senselessness

A writer is hired by the Catholic Church in an unnamed Central American country to edit a thousand-page report documenting military atrocities against Indigenous civilians. As he reads the testimonies — each one more specific and more terrible than the last — he begins to lose his mind. Castellanos Moya writes in a single unbroken monologue of mounting paranoia and dark comedy. The novel is a dispatch about what it does to a person to be immersed in documentation of atrocity — the specific psychological cost of bearing witness to things that should not have happened and did. The most formally original Central American novel ever written.