Translation Rights TQE / The Weapon in Man

In El arma en el hombre, Castellanos Moya tells the vigorous story of an atypical character from the Salvadorian war, for whom violence is not a necessity, but rather a job.  In the depths of this novel we find the cruel reality of dictatorships and the trail of pain that remains in the war fronts.

The members of the squad nicknamed him Robocop.  He measures 1’90m, weighs nearly 100 kilos, and is one of the fiercest combatants.  He was sergeant of an assault troop, but once the war concluded and the peace treaties were signed between the guerrillas and the government of a Central American nation, he was demobilized.  The only possessions that he conserved for his reintegration into a supposedly civil life were three fusils, eight fragmentation grenades, his 9 mm., and a check worth three months’ salary.  What to do?  Since the weak do not survive, Robocop will dedicate himself to the only work for which he is trained:  fighting.  And so he will become a member of several gangs of delinquents – integrated by ex-militaries or ex-guerrillas, who operate like highly specialized commandos within the framework of a delicate political transition.  Gangs for which loyalty is merely provisional and treason always imminent.

About El arma en el hombre

“The light rhythm that Castellanos Moya imposes upon his prose (...) demonstrates that he is an author, owner of a craft, who knows where he wants to take the reader.”

Crónica Dominical, Mexico

“It is undoubtedly a good decision that the author allows his hero to tell his own story, and the personal tale of the sergeant constitutes one of the incentives of the story which benefits from the immediacy and the emotional force of the first person (…).”

Javier Aparicio, El Pais

“A vibrating story which can be read as the allegory of how the monster of violence devours her children.”

Leer

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.