Translation Rights TQE / Dream of the Return

In 1991, when the conversations between the Salvadorean government and the guerrilla seem to forebode a near peace, journalist Erasmo Aragón is about to leave Mexico and return to San Salvador to begin a new life and partake in the foundation of a new magazine, a project about which he is very enthusiastic. Erasmo also sees his return to what he considers to be his native country as an escape valve to the growingly tormentous relationship with Eva, with whom he has a daughter. Before leaving, Erasmo visits Doctor Chente Alvarado with the desperate hope that he can help soothe his terrible stomach pains. He undergoes several sessions of hypnosis with the doctor in order to liberate the stress which, among other factors, is provoking this pain. But the well-being that he feels at the beginning of the sessions soon becomes an obsession to remember anything that he might have revealed to the doctor, and as to why he suddenly finds himself reliving tragic episodes from his life.

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.