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FEEL THE FISSURE

Senselessness

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

He edits a genocide report. The words start following him.

For you if

you want to understand how sustained exposure to documented atrocity changes the person reading it

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A writer is hired by the Catholic Church in an unnamed Central American country to edit a thousand-page report documenting military atrocities against Indigenous civilians. As he reads the testimonies — each one more specific and more terrible than the last — he begins to lose his mind. Castellanos Moya writes in a single unbroken monologue of mounting paranoia and dark comedy. The novel is a dispatch about what it does to a person to be immersed in documentation of atrocity — the specific psychological cost of bearing witness to things that should not have happened and did. The most formally original Central American novel ever written.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
El Salvador
Voice
Written by a Salvadoran author
Themes
bearing witnesswar and trauma
Topics
guatemalan civil war

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