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by Gin, December 9, 2008 9:50 AM
Senselessness is the first of Castellanos Moya's novels to be translated into English, and though short, it manages to cast a wide net that demands as much from the reader as it does from its central character. In an unnamed Latin American country that resembles Castellanos Moya's own El Salvador, a man is asked to clean up a 1,100-page report on the massacre of the region's indigenous peoples. As he makes his way through the work, he begins to find himself haunted by the gruesome and yet strangely resigned testimonials of the survivors; as a result, he can hardly reconcile the past with the mundane interactions that now occur everyday between the former torturers and their victims.
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