Translation Rights TQE / Disgust

After eighteen years of voluntary exile in Canada, Edgardo Vega must return to El Salvador for his mother’s burial. The trip itself, “a terrifying travesty”, is unbearable, his compatriots are repulsive to him and provoke a sense of anxiety that will accompany him until his departure. He tells all of this to Moya, an old friend from school, who he meets for a drink during his trip, and who will later reproduce Vega’s savage monologue. Vega finds El Salvador hateful and he attacks every aspect of it: Church, education, politics and politicians, his own family… and through the exorcism of this criticism, he will even come to identify himself with Thomas Bernhard.

For Castellanos Moya, writing this novel was “a discharge. A discharge of frustration”, since at the end of the civil war, he had to witness the falling apart of the projects in which he had partaken in order to achieve a democratic transition within Salvadorian society.

This may very well be the best book by Castellanos Moya… His acid sense of humor threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles, who after reading it feel the irrepressible need to hang the author in a public square. To be honest, I cannot think of anything more honorable for a real writer.

Roberto Bolaño, about EL ASCO

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.