Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

On the heels of rereading The Dream of My Return last week, I pulled out the copy of Senselessness I picked up at a used bookstore in San Francisco shortly after I read The Dream of My Return for the first time. I noticed too late – after buying it – that it was a heavily marked up copy. I hate reading books with writing and highlighting in them; I find it distracting. I kept intending to get a new copy, but held on to the marked up one in the interim. Today, I decided to read it despite the annotations. 

I'm glad I read Senselessness in close proximity to The Dream of My Return. In many ways, it's similar. It's a first-person narrative by a Salvadoran writer who has been forced to flee El Salvador after having written critically about the government. He's come to an unnamed country – probably Guatemala – on a 3-month contract to copy-edit an 1100-page report of testimonials to the atrocities perpetuated by that country's military against various indigenous populations. Day after day, he reads accounts of the most horrific scenes. In a notebook, he writes down the sentences and phrases from these accounts that he finds most affecting – and they are truly affecting. But they begin to haunt him. As a reader, we suspect he's going mad (as do many of his acquaintances in the book). He suffers from crippling paranoia – but is it paranoid?