Senselessness

Senselessness is the eighth novel by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castllanos Moya but first to be translated into English and having now read it I am hoping that his publisher and translator are already working to bring out his other works in English for it is truly a remarkable and a very original book.

As has been noted in other reviews Moya is a great admirer of Thomas Bernhard and the prose style in the book feels like a conscious homage to him, specially in the way his sentences go on to great lengths and certain phrases are repeated as if in a musical refrain, which in effect manages to capture a state of mind which is breaking apart and going under the weight of its own consciousness. Other than that, Bernhard's peculiar style of narration also achieves this strange intermingling of "voices" and this suits Moya's subject in the book too.

The unnamed narrator of Senselessness, who is living in exile in a neighbouring country, has taken up the burdensome job from the catholic church of proofreading and editing 1,100 pages of confessions, testimonies and evidences of massacres of the native population and other atrocities perpetrated by the army. He soon finds himself falling under the spell of the strange poetics of the horror stories in the first person testimonies in the report: "I am not all complete in the mind" says one and at other place another voice laments, "The houses they were sad because no people were inside them..." He notes these down in his personal notebook and obsesses about the "sonority" and "curious syntactic constructions", comparing them to the poetry of Cesar Vallejo who tried to incorporate indigenous voices into his poetry too. He also decides not to share one of these fragments with his employer and colleague because he thinks (and this underscores what I think is the main theme of the book too) that they "might see me as a deluded literati seeking poetry where there were only brutal denunciations of crimes against humanity ... that he would think that I was a simple stylist who wasn't paying any attention to the content of the report."

This is only half of the novel. The other parallel narrative track follows his growing paranoia as he distrusts both the church and the military, which still employs one of the perpetrators of the atrocities, in fact as a senior officer even. He is also a compulsive drinker and is obsessed with sex. All of this result in some strange humour which is all the more unsettling because it feels so out of place. Still there is one "sex-scene" which is really one of the most comical things I have read in a long time. I still don't exactly know what to make of this part of the novel but the remarkable end does put a perspective to all the paranoiac ravings that preceded it.

Lastly, and this may be a potential spoiler, the book reminded me of Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder (Review from new york times here) which was widely reviewed last year and which talks of a very similar incident in Guatemala. I haven't read the book but it seemed Moya is using the same real life incident as a starting point for this book. Of the few reviews I read of the book, none of them have mentioned it.

In the end, neither the Thomas Bernhard homage nor the real life connection take anything away from it or diminish Moya's achievement in any way. It is one of the most unusual and original books I have read in quite some time. Also, I wish they had kept the original Spanish cover of the book. It wonderfully captures what is inside.

Update: This article talks about the background in detail and also mentions the truth and reconciliation commission in Guatemala which inspired this book.

Also, among other reviews I liked this one in the village voice. Another enthusiastic (and exhortatory) review from Kubla.

2008 in Reading

I didn't read a lot of fiction this year. Nothing like last couple of years when I discovered Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo and others for the first time. (Last year's list here.) I spent more time reading non-fiction and even there, mostly essays and fragments, the most provocative and disturbing of which was "Modernity and the Holocaust" by Polish-British sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. After this I tried reading his other works on consumerism and modern societies and found similar provocative insights. Basically he explains how the scientific-technocratic-instrumentalist worldview which defines our modern world poses grave problems to an ethical life though he ultimately, like most philosophers, is better at diagnosis than at treatment. One of his essays is titled "Does Ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?" He is quite pessimistic about it. I have probably become oversensitive to the whole issue now. I just bristle when I see the language of science, technology or economics being applied in the domain of personal human affairs. I am looking forward to exploring more in this direction, specially the work of Jurgen Habermas.

I also spent a lot of time this year struggling with Heidegger's philosophy though without much success. Still from whatever I read and understood, he had me convinced that the story of (so-called) human civilization was actually a story of decline and disaster and that we all have probably come to this earth a few thousand years too late. I didn't understand his ideas about the various modes of being, authenticity etc totally but they kept moving around in my head for most of the year. His essays on the origins of the work of art and on technology were also provocative and in fact startling (and it is true for his other writings as well) in the sense that it showed me the nature of the process of thinking itself rather than just the result of some thought. George Steiner's short monograph on Heidegger was specially brilliant.

The three best books of fiction I read this year were all from Latin America. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis was without any doubt the most entertaining book I read the whole year. Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was a strange, evocative and densely layered ghost story which stayed with me for a long time. Senselessness by Carlos Moya was no less strange. It kept me thinking about what to really make of it.

The most disappointing book of the year for me was Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. I had wanted to read it for such a long time but found it tame and boring. A slog through and through, absolutely contrary to its reputation. I was also extremely annoyed by Cultural Amnesia, the essay collection by Clive James. Sartre was an idiot. Neruda was a fascist. Brecht was a moron. And on and on. It had me actually depressed realizing that just reading a lot and having an opinion on everything doesn't make you wise, interesting or open to different ways of looking at the world and yourself. A great lesson to learn, specially for bloggers.

The War of the End of the World

Does anybody know what the image on the cover of this book means in the context of Christian narratives about the end of the world? The wikipedia article on Eschatology doesn't have anything. (I didn't read it fully, I just searched for "dog"). May be it is just a generic picture with dog as devil fighting the angel (of death?) but it does seem much more specific than that or may be it is not related to all this at all. The edition I read from had a different, much more abstract cover with a vulture in the sky and an abstracted and bleak landscape below littered with skulls. Anyway, I was thinking about this book after this discussion about Mario Vargas Llosa and the Latin American novel on Madhuri's blog. This is my personal favourite of his novels and I think it is a must-read for anyone interested in latin american culture, politics and history. At over 600 pages it is also a huge novel but at the same time a complete page-turner too.

A few words about the novel now that I am at it. Some people complain that it is rather simple and straightforward in style and and that Vargas Llosa eschews experimentation which has become one of the hallmarks of the latin american novel (and I am not talking about the awful and rather condescending tag of "magical realism" here). I will be the last person to defend stylistic conservatism but in this case the form of the novel is determined by what Vargas Llosa was aiming to achieve - that is, to represent a real historical event in all its complexity and the multitude of often contradictory voices without privileging one over the other. This is in fact a great example of what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the "polyphonic novel," and it is specially important for Vargas Llosa to follow this idiom because it is such a politically charged subject that it could have easily become a propagandist work if handled in any other way.

The novel fictionalizes a real event from Brazil's modern history - the war of Canudos which took place in the late nineteenth century which was also one of the events which came to define modern Brazilian national identity by providing it with a legitimacy both against the monarchist forces and the provincial power centres. In Vargas Llosa's hands this story also becomes emblematic of violent entrances into modernity that many other third world countries went through too - the rise of the modern nation state and all the violence that it necessarily entailed.

The story that Vargas Llosa tells is extremely complex and cast incredibly huge and in fact I have forgotten lots of details in the last 4-5 years but surprisingly a lot of this book has stayed with me all this time. The main thread of the novel is about the rise to power of the central character (even though he always remains mysterious and in the background) Antonio the Counselor, a priest and a preacher, who thinks that the modern democratic and secularized republic which has overthrown the Christian monarchy is not only a repudiation of Christian teachings but in fact an agent of Satan and the harbinger of the end of the world. His cult is actually one of the many millenialist cults which arose from time to time in medieval Europe too, which also gives Llosa a chance to link this particular event to a larger current of history itself, not just religious but also modern Utopian political beliefs which were similarly propelled by similar messianism. The Counselor attracts a massive following consisting of bunch of colourful characters - bandits, prostitutes, beggars, circus freaks, in general poor, desperate and starving people of the region and also a European anarchist who sees in Counselor's utopian pursuit a reflection of his own ideological thinking. Of course it all ends badly and Vargas Llosa doesn't spare any of the details of the brutal and violent fate that most of these characters meet in the end.

What makes it so successful and powerful is, as I said above, its polyphonic complexity. Llosa was himself going through an ideological transformation at that time after having publicly broken off from the leftist movement but he never lets ideological bias colour his judgement at any place. He presents each of the characters on every side of the political spectrum with their own indirect interior monologues so that the reader himself can judge and think about their actions or else what happens to them. In the end a powerful feeling of despair does remain - the feeling of the essential senselessness and meaninglessness of history, the idea that history is just a sequence of calamities with no purpose at all, other than senseless violence itself. I don't think that this bleak and extremely pessimistic vision of history with its anti-Utopianism is the only valid reading of the novel. Like any complex and authentic work of art this leaves room open for multiple different interpretations. The book is actually dedicated to Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha who wrote the first account of the war based on his first hand experiences called Rebellion in the Backlands. It is considered an important literary work in its own right though it is not as famous in the English speaking world. There is a character of a journalist in the novel which seems to be modeled after him. In a rather plain and transparently metaphorical way Llosa makes him myopic - implying that even though he is able to see the events clearly he still misses the larger philosophical meaning of what happens. This is also a statement by Llosa justifying his own work as a novelist too. There are truths that only a novelist can find, truths that will always escape journalists and historians no matter how diligent, sincere and honest they may be. In short it is a huge novel but every bit worth the time and effort.