City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter is an old acquaintance of mine. Someone I haven't seen in several years, but have followed with interest from a distance on social media or through word from mutual friends. When her book came out earlier this year, I looked forward to reading it. She did a book event at Books Are Magic with Mara Wilson that I put in my calendar, only to discover a couple days before that it was sold out. "Congratulations, Temim!" I thought. I kept meaning to pick up a copy of City of Laughter from one of my local bookshops, but eventually ended up buying my copy from bookshop.org when I was ordering some other books just to finally get it because I'd been intending to for months. I started it last Sunday.

It's strange to read a novel by someone you know. It's hard not to overlay everything you know about the person onto the characters, maybe even more when it's someone you don't know well because there are more gaps in your knowledge of the person to fill in with the fictional version. I found myself doing this for the first several chapters of City of Laughter especially – the parts where the central character, Shiva, was in Brooklyn. But gradually as the book went on, Shiva went to Warsaw, and other characters became more centered, I was finally able to break free of my preconceptions and just get into the world of the book. The story jumps around across time and generations, with some beautiful tangents to recount a folk story or a study of park benches or some other disconnected line of thought. At times it was hard to see how these fragments all fit together, but they were told so beautifully (the prose in this book is wonderful) that I almost didn't care. And then in the end, it sort of did make sense, because rather than providing resolution – a thing Shiva expects to appear and make sense of everything – the book chooses a different path. That finding needn't be the goal; the act of seeking can be and end in itself. 

Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

I don't remember what specifically put Horacio Castellanos Moya in my mind last month, but I had the urge to read something of his and having already read The Dream of My Return and Senselessness twice each, plus The She-Devil in the Mirror, I figured I should just buy copies of the books of his that I didn't already own. I brought Tyrant Memory with me on vacation to Maine as a back-up in case I finished Trust, which I did the day before I left to come back home. I only got about 15 pages in while in Maine – I found it a bit slower to read than his other books, but I kept going with it when I got home and finished it this afternoon.

Tyrant Memory is the fourth book I've read by Castellanos Moya, but only the second set in his home country of El Salvador. It covers a period of about one month in 1944 when a coup attempt followed by a popular nonviolent protest resulted in the resignation of the country's fascist-leaning President, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The bulk of the book's narrative is told through the daily journal entries of an upper class Salvadoran woman, Haydée, whose husband, a former secretary to the president and diplomat, is imprisoned after becoming an outspoken critic of the president. A few days into Haydée's journaling, the coup attempt takes place. Her son, a radio broadcaster, voiced support for the coup over the air and is forced to flee when the coup turns out to have failed. The son's period in hiding makes up the other major part of the narrative. The book closes with an epilogue nearly 30 years after the main events of the book, where we learn a little more about what's become of the protagonists in the intervening years.

It's Haydée's story – and her transformation – that was most interesting in Tyrant Memory. While her husband has always been active in politics – both in service to the President, and later in opposition to him – we understand that she has stayed out of those things. It is the realm of men. But with her husband imprisoned and her adult son in hiding and sentenced to death, she develops a determination and will that seems to be a surprise even to herself. She is initially inspired by the mothers of two young political prisoners who she meets when they are all trying to visit their imprisoned family members. The women are organizing the wives and mothers of the political prisoners and of the people who have been executed for participating in the coup. Haydée takes up the cause enthusiastically, using her own connections to raise funds, support student activists, reach out to the press, and communicate with the diplomatic corps. 

It's been a while since I read The She-Devil in the Mirror, but I found myself thinking about it now and then while reading Tyrant Memory. Inasmuch as I had formed a mental image of San Salvador, it came from The She-Devil in the Mirror. But that book is set in a modern San Salvador that comes across very differently from the 1944 version presented in Tyrant Memory. As I was reading, I found myself forming a new imaginary San Salvador that feels much more tangible and, frankly, interesting than the one in The She-Devil in the Mirror. It's also striking that the two books are told from the perspective of women (though they are very different women). In the way that she recorded events, both the mundane and the momentous, Haydée felt very real to me. 

I'm glad I was moved to get copies of Castellanos Moya's remaining books, and also glad to see he has several others that haven't yet been translated into English. I hope someone is working on that. 

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

I almost started Trust back in 2022 when it was the WNYC Get Lit book club selection. I was stuck in an airport, unhappy with the books I had with me in hard copy and remembered I could borrow it as an e-book from the New York Public Library thanks to the book club. I think I read half a page before I realized it was not going to be the book that got me through a 12-hour wait at the airport. In remained on my theoretical to-read list though, and its inclusion in the New York Times list of the best 100 books of the 21st Century was the reminder I needed to get around to getting a copy and reading it.

I heard enough about Trust when it was out that I knew loosely what to expect from the structure and the broad strokes of the central character, a wildly rich depression-era financier, but little else. When I opened the book to start reading, I think I missed the first section title page, because I didn't realize until I got to the second section that the first had been a novel within the novel. As I read the first section without that context, I accepted it as the "truth" (as opposed to a fiction), while still knowing it would be undermined by the subsequent sections. But the book plays out in a more complicated way than I expected. (Not that I expected it to be simple. I'd read Diaz's earlier book and I could never expect something simple after that.) Each section, with its new frame of reference and new narrator, gives the reader a new perspective on the sections that preceded it. I enjoyed the first section well enough. The second was odd and stilted (the text in the text is rough and unfinished). It was the third section, told from the point of view of the private secretary to the financier, that really drew me in. It was as if suddenly the book was in full color. The final section is short and disjointed, but occasionally brilliant -- finally offering the reader a clear glimpse of the contradictory figures presented in the other three sections.

Translation State, by Ann Leckie, and Canción, by Eduardo Halfon

After finishing two books in the space of a week (which, to be clear, it took me a lot longer than a week to read... one of them I had been reading for months!), I felt suddenly freed and like I could dive into anything. This coincided with the New York Times publishing its much discussed (for approximately 3 days) list of 100 best books of the 21st century [to date]*, so I had that list fresh in my mind – particularly the handful of books from the list that I owned but had not read. Two weeks ago now, I was headed off to eastern Long Island for a weekend, facing a weekend of relaxation with a long train ride at the end of it. The perfect time, I thought, to dive into something long and serious. I selected The Line of Beauty. I spent a pleasant afternoon reading The Line of Beauty in the garden of the house where I was staying. The other parts of the weekend flew by. I was tired by the time I got on my 3-hour train home, and minutes after I boarded I saw the news that President Biden had decided not to seek reelection after all. (I can hardly believe that was just two weeks ago today.) Of course, I spent the entire train trip on social media and group texts rather than reading my book. 36 hours later, I left for Toronto. I brought The Line of Beauty with me, and didn't read at all during the 5 days I was there. They were long days of attending a work conference, followed by long days of visiting friends. There was never enough sleep. And then I flew home again. I got home last Sunday and amazingly managed to motivate myself to work out and then there were still hours left in the day and I thought I should get back to reading – keep up the momentum I'd built before my travels. I read a few pages of The Line of Beauty, but it was slow and I wanted fast and I had just gotten a copy of Translation State, so I changed my plans and started it. 48 hours later I finished it. 

I wrote this long explanation of how I came to be reading Translation State perhaps to avoid having to write much about it at all. As with every Leckie book I've read, I feel unable or somehow unqualified to speak to it at any length. I enjoyed it. I realized after finishing it that there were links to the Ancillary books that I hadn't totally picked up on. Maybe I need to go back to those. Maybe if I did, I'd have more to say.

After finishing Translation State I did, of course, briefly think I'd return to The Line of Beauty, but a few pages in, I decided to set it down again and embark on another book I'd recently acquired (I took advantage of bookshop.org's free shipping day): Eduardo Halfon's Canción. I didn't even know Halfon had a new (if 2022 counts as new) book out. I searched his name on a whim and saw there was one I hadn't read, so I ordered it. This book centers on the story of Halfon's Lebanese grandfather, who emigrated to Guatemala sometime before WWII and who was kidnapped there in 1967 during the Civil War. I always enjoy the meandering way Halfon tells stories, where the significance of various characters or anecdotes only becomes clear later (if it becomes clear). Reading Canción, I was again fascinated by the unexpected world Halfon's books open up. Just his own family history begins to dismantle things that I thought I knew or unconsciously assumed about Guatemala, about interwar immigration, about – in this case – Lebanon, which I discovered I knew even less about that I thought I did. 

I first read Halfon because he was Guatemalan and I hadn't read any books from Guatemala, but reading his books has opened my understanding about other parts of the world as well. In the very first pages of Canción, Halfon writes,

I had come to Japan to participate in a Lebanese writers' conference. After receiving the invitation a few weeks earlier, and after reading it and rereading it until I was sure it wasn't a mistake or a joke, I'd opened the closet to find my Lebanese disguise – among my many disguises – inherited from my paternal grandfather, born in Beirut. I'd never been to Japan before. And I had never been asked to be a Lebanese writer. A Jewish writer, yes. A Guatemalan writer, obviously. A Latin American writer, of course. A Central American writer, less and less. A U.S. writer, more and more. A Spanish writer, when traveling on that passport was desirable. A Polish writer, on one occasion, at a Barcelona bookstore that insisted – insists – on shelving my books in the Polish literature section. A French writer, since I lived for a time in Paris and some people assume I'm still there. 

Is this a distillation of the absurdity of my world books project? It could be. But I've known it was flawed from the start and if I hadn't "needed" to read a Guatemalan writer, I might never have found my way to Halfon. Maybe this is the whole reason for the project.

*I could nitpick a few things about this list, but I'll limit myself to two: (1) It was really lacking in literature in translation, and (2) I find it weird that it included (at number 71) The Copenhagen Trilogy, a collection of books that were written in the 1960s/70s. Even the translations of the first two books in the trilogy date to the 1980s. This is not a 21st century book!

Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, and Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías

After a long dry spell, I finished 2 books in the last week (and they have unexpectedly similar color schemes). I debated whether to start this post with Our Lady of the Nile or Tomás Nevinson because while I started the latter first, I finished the former a few days earlier. 

Since reading Mukasonga's memoir The Barefoot Woman three years ago and learning her first novel had become available in English, I was eager to read it. So I was pleased when it was selected by my Women in Translation book club. Informed by Mukasonga's own youth, we are told, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a prestigious Catholic boarding school for girls in the Rwandan mountains, near the source of the Nile. There is a small clutch of schoolgirls whose lives we learn a little about – some in more depth than others – as well as the Father and nuns around them, a white man with an obsession with ancient Egypt who lives nearby, and assorted other characters. We start to grasp the ethnic distinctions among the girls indirectly, in how they relate to or talk about one another. The book is set at a moment when the power in Rwanda has started to shift, in the wake of Rwandan independence when the Hutu majority population was solidifying its power. The narrative in Our Lady of the Nile consists mostly of vignettes focusing in on one or two of the girls, and together they give us a picture of life at the school and the situation of Rwanda's elite class. This was an interesting book and I'm glad I read it, but I didn't find it as lovely or as moving as The Barefoot Woman.

I had been waiting for Tomás Nevinson to come out in paperback before picking it up with the intention of starting it on January 1, 2025, but then a thoughtful houseguest got me the hardcover in early spring of this year and it sat there on my coffee table staring at me for a couple weeks until finally I decided not to wait. I started in on or around April 9. I got a few hundred pages into it – with Marías it always takes a few hundred pages for things to really get going anyway – but it's a long book, even for Marías, and after two weeks I had to set it aside to read my Women In Translation book club's May selection, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job. I didn't quite manage to finish that in time for my book club meeting on May 5 (though I got most of the way) and then these two unfinished books, both of which I'd read more than 200 pages of, were sitting waiting to be finished and instead I read nothing at all. For months. I took Tomás Nevinson to Paris and back in June and never opened it. When I got home from Paris, I knew I had to start Our Lady of the Nile right away to read it in time for my July book club meeting, so Tomás Nevinson went back to the coffee table. Finally, last Friday I returned to it.

I had chosen a good stopping point back in April. The book is divided into large numbered sections with several short un-numbered chapters in each. I paused at one of the numbered sections, just as there was a shift in the narrative, the focus transferred from one character to another. What can I say about Tomás Nevinson? It's about what I expected – not in content, precisely. I assumed it would cover, from Nevinson's perspective, the same period as Berta Isla, but in fact it picks up after the events of that book. I can't even imagine reading Tomás Nevinson without having read Berta Isla – would it hold up at all? There's some interplay between Marías' novels, you could almost ask of any one of them if it would stand up on its own, but Tomás Nevinson seems especially tied to Berta Isla – Marías described it as a companion book. 

I don't think I've lost any affection for Marías, but over years of reading him I've sometimes (and more and more as time goes on) felt forced to confront some, to put it kindly, outdated attitudes about gender that show up in his books. It always takes, as I have said, a while to get around to the point, but Tomás Nevinson opens with the character confessing his own old fashioned sense of ... perhaps chivalry is the way to put it? Although he is an agent who has killed before, Nevinson could never imaging killing a woman – even in the line of duty. So of course we know this must be where the book is headed. [Spoilers follow.]

War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda

I'm going to Barcelona in a week and so I wanted to read something by Mercè Rodoreda, but I've been a little frightened off from her since I started and had to abandon Death in Spring a couple years ago. It was so, so grim. The other books of hers I had not read were War, So Much War, which didn't sound like an upbeat book based on the title alone, and Camellia Street, which I've seen described as her starkest book. I thought about rereading A Broken Mirror, but I had already done two rereads in the first 2 months of 2024, so I thought I really should read something new to me. Last week, as I was reading about Rodoreda and her oeuvre, I read something that said there wasn't actually all that much war in War, So Much War, and I decided I would give it a try. 

The book is a sort of picaresque, following 15-year-old Adrià Guinart, who has left his home in Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He's given a job doing kitchen work, but doesn't last long among the militia. He spends the remainder of the book wandering the Spanish countryside from village to village, where he is by turns beaten up and shunned or taken in and cared for by the people he comes across. Death, destruction, and brutality are everywhere, but occasionally there is kindness. Adrià is hungry, injured, and traumatized. His nightmares blend into his reality, and sometimes reality is the nightmare. 

I would respectfully disagree with the statement that there's not much war in this book, though I can see what led the publisher to say it. The war is more in the background than in the foreground of the book, but at the same time, it is everywhere. As in The Time of the Doves, War, So Much War tells the experience of war from the perspective of the civilians who are living through it. (I think it's fair to call Adrià a civilian, even if he did try and join up; he is a child.) The war permeates every aspect of their lives, but they still need to find food to eat, tend their land, bury their dead. This is the reality for most people living through war. The stories of war aren't just the ones about soldiers on the front line. 

What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari

Let me start by saying I had only half finished What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari when I started writing this as part of a longer essay on memorials that I'm still working through in my head. 

I believe there is power in the telling and the naming of things. This is the heart of Bushra al-Maqtari’s project in What Have You Left Behind? To name the victims of the ongoing civil war in Yemen and to provide the survivors the chance to bear witness to the horrors they were subjected to. As might be expected, this book is devastating and hard to read. The individual testimonies are short – mostly about 3 pages, give or take – but each one captures succinctly and plainly the worst moments in the storytellers' lives. I found I needed to stop frequently to maintain my focus on each individual story. 

I keep a mental running list of books that attempt to show the reader the scope of tragedy or evil through a simple accounting. In no particular order, they include: The Trees by Percival Everett, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. EEG by Daša Drndić does it too. On some level, the whole of EEG is an accounting of atrocities, but it includes enumerated lists as well: the catalog of books taken from deported Jews; the list of disappeared chess players. Reading Drndić turned me into a person who pauses to study any metal plaques I may come across on the sides of buildings, or paving stones, or memorial sites. It's my own way of counting and honoring the dead. 

It occurs to me now that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness is sort of a meta version of this type of book. The narrator of that book is reading and editing accounts – not unlike the ones Bushra al-Maqtari collected – of testimonials from the surviving victims of the military regime in Guatemala (though the country is not named in the book). The witness accounts are mostly from indigenous people, who in some cases watched their entire communities get slaughtered. The reader of Senselessness gets the accounts only second hand, as the narrator filters them for us, pulling out phrases that he finds particularly resonant and stories that exemplify the horror. This book doesn’t read like the others, as a literal accounting, but we see the effects that reading such a enumeration of horrors has on the narrator. 

In What Have You Left Behind? the listing is the whole book. After 200 pages of individual accounts, there is "A List of Victims in Brief," going beyond those accounted for in the main text. It covers the period between March 26, 2015 and September 29, 2017 and goes on for some 40 pages. I must also add that reading this in the context of the current situation in Gaza was rough. The stories told in this book sound strikingly similar to those in the news every day from Gaza. 

I had the sense almost as soon as I started What Have You Left Behind? that al-Maqtari undertook the project both to document the horrors that have been brought upon the civilians of Yemen indiscriminately by both sides in the civil war, but also as a way of doing something that might put her at a remove, even as she is collecting the most devastating stories out of what seems like an infinite supply of them. I thought about my father who, when he found himself in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 in the moments before the collapse of the twin towers, bought a camera and took pictures until he was able to be evacuated. The camera creates a distance. It takes you from being a participant to being a spectator, a documentarian. I think doing reportage may have a similar effect. However, at the very end of the book, al-Maqtari includes her own testimony: a remembrance of a friend, a fellow activist and founder of a humanitarian relief organization, who was killed by a militia shell in 2018. This serves to remind us that while she is reporting on the war, she is also living through it, with all its devastating effects.

A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I started Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts back in January and finished it this morning, making it the second book I've actually finished for Mark Slutsky's "Barely a Book Club" – despite starting them all. It is the first of a three-part memoir of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople, begun in 1933. This book covers his setting out from England in December 1933 just up to his arrival in Hungary at Easter in 1934. His travels took him through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, modern-day Slovakia, with a backtrack to visit Prague, and then just to the border of Hungary at Esztergom. Leigh Fermor, who was just 18 when he started his journey, wandered through a Europe just before the onset of World War II, and because he did not write this book until the 1970s, he manages to capture both what he saw then without the advantage of retrospect, and also to bring the experience of the war and the decades that followed it to bear as well. 

I read the first half of A Time of Gifts rather slowly over a couple weeks in January. I decided it was not the right book to take with me on vacation to Mexico, so I set it aside while I read the two books I did take with me, and then I read the second half quite quickly - the bulk of it just in the last couple days. There were a few stretches of the book that I found a tad tedious – at times, Leigh Fermor goes on at considerable length about stretches of history that were mostly unfamiliar to me, where just a name here and there rang a bell from my high school European history class. He gets caught up, too, in some descriptions that I found made the places harder to imagine rather than easier. But when he comes across people, the force of his personality shines through and you wish you could have known him. Leigh Fermor made fast friends every place he stopped along the road, sometimes with minimal shared language. He communes with peasants and aristocrats, and everything between. He's not above sleeping in the town jail (an option that was evidently available to poor travelers) or in barns or in Salvation Army hostels where every inmate is checked for parasites, when on other nights he sleeps in palaces owned by friends of friends he's made along the way. The number of people who gave him a free bed and a meal along the road is astonishing. This must have been a more common practice 100 years ago, but one feels (and sees) that there must have been something, too, about Leigh Fermor himself that warmed people to him and led them to open their homes and share their food.

I think I found the second half the book more engaging than the first in part because it covered ground I was more familiar with. I've never been to Germany apart from a few hours in Trier, which I drove to after noticing how close I was to Germany on a visit to Luxembourg. But I have visited Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, traveling between the three cities by train, very close to what must have been Leigh Fermor's route on foot. 

Leigh Fermor's time in Vienna was of particular interest to me, coinciding as it did with a moment in Vienna that already interested me. The Vienna of my imagination comes from Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, was home to Freud and Elias Canetti. 1934, the year Leigh Fermor arrived in Vienna, was the same year Stefan Zweig left it. Freud stayed on another 4 years, but he should have left earlier: Marie Bonaparte essentially paid a ransom for him to allow him to escape. During his time in Vienna, Leigh Fermor observes,

The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Hapsburg Empire at its widest expansion. Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of Southern Slav. 

Reading this, I think of Joseph Roth coming to Vienna for his education after a childhood in what is now Western Ukraine, or the Ladino-speaking Elias Canetti, born in present-day Bulgaria, who spent part of his childhood in Vienna and returned there to go to university, staying – like Freud – until 1938. The chapter in A Time of Gifts about Vienna is infused with everything he didn't understand when he was there, but which the Leigh Fermor who was writing the book 40 years later knew lay just beneath the surface. 

Leigh Fermor's observation on arriving in Bratislava was surprisingly similar to one I had when I arrived there: "Listening to the unfamiliar hubbub of Slovak and Magyar the other side, I realized I was at last in a country where the indigenous sounds meant nothing at all." It seems obvious in retrospect, but when I planned my trip that included Bratislava and Budapest, I gave no thought at all to the potential language barrier. I studied German in college, not that I needed it at all in Vienna (or that I remembered much for that matter), but when I arrived in Bratislava, I realized I didn't know the most basic things: I couldn't say hello, or thank you. I couldn't read a menu. I had never felt so at sea. (The only place I'd been before where I truly didn't know any of the language was Tokyo - but Tokyo is quite easy to navigate as an English speaker, and even then I did know the words for Good Morning and Thank You.) When I traveled onward to Budapest, Hungrian was equally mysterious, but English was in much wider use. I wish I had read A Time of Gifts before that trip. 

On finishing A Time of Gifts I immediately went out and ordered the second volume of Leigh Fermor's memoir. I look forward to reading about the next leg of his journey. 

Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis

Mockingbird was the second book I brought with me to Mexico. Like Senselessness, I selected it primarily because it was a book I wouldn't mind leaving behind if I did finish it. I do kind of love the cover, but it's a beat up mass market edition that I didn't think I'd feel attached to. As usual, I didn't get any reading at all done while I was on the ground, but I started Mockingbird on the flight home. I was too tired to read much on the plane, but the first few pages did capture my attention, so I kept going with it after I got home. 

I seem to remember my father went on a Walter Tevis kick a few years ago and I got this on his recommendation. I'd never heard of Tevis, though of course I'd heard of the movie adaptations of his books. This was before The Queen's Gambit TV adaptation, which brought him a whole new round of attention. 

Mockingbird is set in a distant future when humanity is in decline, suicide is rampant, children have ceased to be born, and people live isolated from one another in a drugged state that respects the supreme rule of privacy. I suppose it's a bit different from many other books in the post-apocalyptic genre, because it seems to take place amid a long, slow decline, not in the aftermath of a single event. (I claim no expertise on the genre, so maybe this isn't as uncommon as I imagine.) I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started Mockingbird. In retrospect, I'm not surprised my dad was a fan because he enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction as a rule. I'm not so crazy about it usually, but I did love Mockingbird.

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya (again)

I'm on a plane from New York to Cancun. I decided at the last moment to bring my copy of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness with me, because (as I'm sure I mentioned when I wrote about it before -- assuming I read it in a year when I was writing a about all the books I read) the edition I have is terribly marked up, with not very astute marginalia. "This guy is weird," for example. I recently came into another copy, so I decided i could bring my marked up copy to Mexico, read it, and leave it behind. It took me about three quarters of my flight to read it cover to cover. 

I didn't remember many details about Senselessness beyond that it was about a guy who gets a job copyediting 1100 pages of firsthand testimonies by indigenous people and activists who survived the brutal massacres of countless people at the hands of the military in an unnamed country. Our narrator is not always sympathetic, but he slips into a state of madness from reading -- absorbing -- these horrors day in and out. "I am not complete in the mind," is the opening passage of the book, a quote from one of these indigenous survivors, but a reflection as well of the narrator's own state. The reader must wonder if his growing paranoia is justified, or if it's only that he is not complete in the mind.

On this reading, I read Senselessness as a sort of sequel to Castellanos Moya's book, The Dream of My Return, which I've also read twice, but it seems to me in the wrong order. I should go back and read it now with this fresh in my mind. In The Dream of My Return, the narrator is on the verge of leaving Mexico City for his home country, where his life may be in danger, but where he feels a compulsion to return, risking his own life. This potentially dangerous copyediting job could be the thing that awaits him there.