Horacio Castellanos Moya - Selflessness (New Directions, 2008) **½

To be honest, when I read the plot - where? - I was immediately interested in reading this novel: "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 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.”

The narrator gets vague instructions and is even wondering whether his boss - the Church - has any idea about the content and potential impact of the report. While reading, he is amazed by the poetic responses by the indigenous villagers when tortured and killed. Some examples

• The houses they were sad because no people were inside them.
• For me the sorrow is not to bury him myself.
• They grabbed Diego Nap López and the grabbed a knife each officer giving him a stab or cutting off a small slice
• While the cadavers they were burning, everyone clapped and they began to eat

The poetic phrasing by the indigenous people is a way to create distance, or to make sense of it, to objectivise the horror of their experiences. 

The subject is as hard as it can get, yet the personal life of the narrator and his petty sex obsession turn the novel into a puerile story, with long endless sentences that describe in multiple ways what he is doing or experiencing, as a kind of László Krasznahorkai copy-cat. It becomes tedious in the end, including the sexual acrobatics. The harsh reality of the indigenous villagers seems to be a pretext rather than the essence. The author wants to impress instead of to express. And that is rarely good.