The last book I loved was Senselessness, written by by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and translated by Katherine Silver.
I wish I could indulge a paranoid fantasy. Maybe a nice conspiracy theory centered around me. It really unburdens a person from the decision-making day-to-day life requires. “What to do today? Battle the forces arrayed against me? Is there any other option?” Such is the decision-making tree when in the grips of paranoia. But let’s face it. The bulk of humanity and human institutions are just too dumb to get a good conspiracy off the ground. People talk, mistakes are made, someone gets greedy. Everyone gets found out eventually or (more likely) the whole conspiratorial effort was just a waste of time. It’s a damn shame. What if Muslim Kenyans really did conspire to install Barack Obama in the White House 40 years ago? Wouldn’t that be something? But this never happens. So we sit and watch real life play out on the front page of the New York Times.
But sometimes, just sometimes, the bastards are out to get you.
A cracked smile, or a fatalistic grin; these are the expressions I imagine on the narrator’s face in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness. In an unnamed Latin American country, the narrator composes a report for the Catholic Church culled from interviews of survivors of a government massacre of the native population. The natives’ broken descriptions haunt the narrative (and the reader) like a refrain: “The houses they were sad because no people were inside them,” or “There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them.”
But he (our guide) cares little. He complains of his work. He plies women for sex. He grows paranoid as political pressure mounts. He sees shadows where there are none (or could be) and mines the interviews for poetic jewels to show off to his literary friend. He is caustic, unfeeling, lecherous, and damn funny. If he were to mire himself deep in the horrors of the massacre, the novel would sludge along, consuming the reader. But he does no such thing, and, at a brisk 142 pages, Senselessness hums with action, ever moving forward.
He, unlike us in our boring little lives, has good reason to be paranoid. The report he is drafting will implicate powerful national forces, especially the military, and threaten to take down institutions. But it is hard to believe him. When an unapologetic narcissist attempts to convince you of his paranoia, we are hard-wired to believe him: “Sure, the entire military is after you, sure, men are shadowing your every step.” Moya, in effect, invites the reader to doubt the narrator. It’s easy to believe that we are smarter, more well informed, less paranoid than this asshole we’re forced to listen to. We make the mistake of conflating his narcissism with his paranoia; both are repugnant, yet one is rooted in reality.
The mundane yet grim machinations of jaundiced governments consume Senselessness. The narrator and perspective of Senselessness can jar. Moya does not dispense sympathy nor ask the reader to empathize with the natives’ plight. If you cannot do that work yourself, you ought not to be reading this book. But the horrors are real and the jaded narrator cannot escape them.
Senselessness overwhelms. I felt out of breath as the novel crackled towards its conclusions. I felt like the faceless forces after the narrator were after me. This–this breath-taking paranoia real life never provides–is why I loved Senselessness.
