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.
Author: Horacio Castellanos Moya
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 05/01/2008
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.38lbs
Size: 7.84h x 6.55w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780811217071
Language: English
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