Horacio Castellanos Moya – författare

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 the 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." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator—female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable—paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness was acclaimed “an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art” (Village Voice) and “a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials” (Russell Banks).

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Herna´ndez Marti´nez — known as the Warlock — who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Hayde´e Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator’s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Hayde´e’s political awakening in diary entries and Clemente’s frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. Tyrant Memory — sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny — is an unforgettable incarnation of a coun- try’s history in the destiny of one family.

High-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home at the tail end of El Salvador's long civil war.Is the plan a dream or a nightmare?Is he courageous, foolhardy, or just plain dumb?Is the bubbling brew of horrors and threats actual or imagined?After he seeks relief for liver pain through hypnosis (while drinking more than ever, despite the treatments), his few impulse-control mechanisms rapidly dissolve, and reality only rarely intrudes on his cogitations. Harebrained murder plots, half-mad arguments, hysterical rants: the narrative escalates at a maniacal pace, infused with Horacio Castellanos Moya's uniquely outlandish and acerbic sense of humor.

An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling his tale and ranting against everything his country has to offer. Written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard, Revulsion was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolaño called Revulsion Castellanos Moya’s darkest book and perhaps his best: “A parody of certain works by Bernhard and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud.”

Sönderfall är ett förtätat familjedrama i tre akter. Den framstående honduriske advokaten och politikern Erasmo och hans hustru Lena har ett enda barn, dottern Teti, som vill gifta sig med salvadoranen Clemente. Lena motsätter sig detta starkt då Clemente inte bara är 20 år äldre utan till på köpet kommunist. Giftermålet genomförs trots protesterna och paret bosätter sig i El Salvador. Så utbryter krig mellan länderna och Erasmo vädjar till sin dotter att komma tillbaka till hemlandet där hon är i säkerhet. Men Teti vägrar och en dag mördas Clemente under mystiska omständigheter Horacio Castellanos Moya, född i Honduras men uppvuxen i El Salvador, är en av Centralamerikas intressantaste författare och har översatts till en rad språk. Han lever i exil och är för närvarande fristadsförfattare i Pittsburgh, USA. Sönderfall är hans andra roman som översatts till svenska. Om förra boken Sanslöshet skrev pressen bl a : / / på en prosa som forsar fram i långa, meandrande och alltmer uppskruvade meningar, genomsyrade både av paradoxal humor och politisk sprängkraft. Sanslöshet är en roman som går bedrägligt snabbt att läsa, men vars verkan är desto långvarigare. Svenska Dagbladet