Senselessness

A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger. Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases (the houses they were sad because no people were inside them), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger--after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 05/01/2008
ISBN: 9780811217071
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.38lbs
Size: 7.84h x 6.55w x 0.40d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 03/31/2008 pg. 41
Library Journal 05/15/2008 pg. 88