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Bezumlje (2004)

by Horacio Castellanos Moya(Favorite Author)

3.91 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Laguna

review 1: First person narrative from a a neurotic, self-hating translator who's been hired by the Church to translate the historical account of the genocide of the local natives. It's a tipsy narrative that starts a bit off to begin with and evolves into full-blown neurosis as he suspects he's being observed and bound to suffer for his (reluctant) role as "champion of secret history". The ramblings become ever so amusing as he dwells into imaginary scenarios and psychotic hypotheses and the narrative spirals into an unreliable madness of word crutches and verbal tics. Embittered black humor.
review 2: This book was refreshing as FUCK.Quick synopsis: "A sex-obsessed lush of a writer is employed by the Catholic Church to edit and tidy up a 1,100 page report on the army's ... moremassacre and torture of the indigenous villagers a decade earlier. "It's very short, but Moya does an incredible job of pulling you into the narrator's head. It's stream of conscious, but in a way that can be both fluid and jarring when you trace the fragments of paranoia, compulsion, and cynicism running through his head. It's never overwhelming and you very easily become comfortably immersed in his thoughts. What's really impressive is how the author blends the depictions of gruesome war crimes and humor; for such sensitive subject matter, it's very easy to get "atrocity fatigue" where the emotional impact becomes lost after constant exposure to horrifying events, but the author balances it very delicately where it falls in and out of the author's narration in such a way that his growing spiritual sickness becomes yours. And his preoccupation with the words of the victims humanizes the events beyond simple shock value.By the end of the book, you really feel as though you've been in this man's mind and have watched it fall apart due to the rampant hypocrisy, obsession of power, and human sickness surrounding him as he struggles to cope with the Sisyphean work before him. And the final paragraph is an absolutely incredible summation of everything we've seen throughout the book, it's such a "Hooooooooo-ly SHIT!" moment.Highly recommend it! less

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