Translation Rights TQE / Falling to Pieces

Hatred and resentment are like a bonfire: if you feed it, it will cause total destruction. This can serve as a metaphor for Mrs. Lena’s feelings towards her husband, Mr. Erasmo Mira Brossa, a lawyer and President of the Honduran National Party, and her daughter Teti. Unfortunately for Mrs. Lena, who is used to socializing with the upper classes in Honduras, Teti marries Clemente, a divorced man, twenty years her elder and, worst of all, a communist from El Salvador. The situation at home becomes unbearable and Teti leaves to El Salvador with Clemente and their son, Eri. It is 1969 and the war between Honduras and El Salvador causes further stress in the relationship between Mrs. Lena and her daughter. And so Teti, despite mother’s threats, will never return to her native country, not even after her husband’s tragic and mysterious death.

Castellanos Moya plunges the reader into the vigorous turmoil that characterizes his writing, using different registers from a biting dialogue, to an epistle, to an internal monologue, allowing the reader the opportunity to approach the difficult relationship between the characters and the reality in which they live. Desmoronamiento will shake the readers with the violence generated after long years of resentment.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was brought up in El Salvador and has lived, since 1979, in different cities throughout America and Europe. He worked as a journalist in Mexico City for twelve years and lived in Frankfurt, Germany, as a guest writer of the International Frankfurt Book Fair. He currently teaches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has been invited as a guest professor at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of eight novels, six of which have been published by Tusquets, translated into several languages and critically acclaimed. In 2009 the English translation of his novel Insensatez (Senselessness) received the XXVIII Northern California Book Award.