From Publishers Weekly
The first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya's eight fictions to be translated in the U.S., this crushing satire has at its center a feisty young unnamed writer in penurious political exile from an unnamed Latin American country. It opens as he explains the daunting and dangerous freelance job he has taken in an also-unnamed neighboring state: to edit a 1,100-page report prepared for the country's Catholic archdiocese that details the current military regime's torture and murder of thousands of indigenous villagers. The writer despises the Church, but is moved and agitated by the disturbing testimonies of the survivors, at once unspeakable in their horror and unforgettable in their phrasing: the more they killed, the higher they rose up. More or less one long rant, the book's paragraphs go on for pages as the writer gives way to paranoia, and to a sexual longing that his loneliness and powerlessness make nearly unbearable, and that he expresses profanely. It's Moya's genius to make this difficult character seem a product of the same death and disorder documented in the report, as the survivors' voices merge with his own. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
This dark and comic novel is a deft exercise in paranoia and the cost of reckoning with an enormity. (San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein) REVIEW: Reader does not experience fright so much as the verbal bounce of...well-sprung prose. (The New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal) REVIEW: A perfect sense of black-comic timing, the book's style is distinctive. (Times Union, Elizabeth Floyd Mair) REVIEW: An innovative and invigoratinly twisted piece of art. (The Village Voice, Jed Lipinski) REVIEW: This masterwork...recently translated seamlessly into English...is an arresting read. (SF Gate, Mauro Javier Cardenas) REVIEW: Manages a brilliant narrative strategy...where everything happens at once. (Ron Slate, Ron Slate) REVIEW: Chaotic, rampaging approach that characterizes almost the entirety of this short, spirited work. (Daily Literary News, Sameer Rahim) REVIEW: A brave and important novel. (Ready Steady Book, Stephen Mitchelmore)
作者：奥拉西奥·卡斯特利亚诺斯·莫亚（Horacio Castellanos Moya，1957— ）
萨尔瓦多作家，出生在洪都拉斯，持萨尔瓦多国籍，之后在加拿大、哥斯达黎加、墨西哥、西班牙和德国都生活过。他曾在墨西哥及危地马拉的新闻机构、杂志社和报社担任编辑二十余年，现在美国艾奥瓦大学西葡语系讲授创意写作。代表作品包括《错乱》《恶心：托马斯·伯恩哈德在圣萨尔瓦多》《记忆暴君》《归国梦》《镜中的女恶魔》《与蛇共舞》等。2014年，他被智利政府授予曼努埃尔·罗哈斯奖章，该奖章为西语文学界最高奖项之一。
译者：张婷婷
译者，美国印第安纳大学西葡语系博士，主要研究中美洲战后文学。