Translation Rights TQE / Foolishness

Without bothering to think about the extent to which this decision will change his life, the protagonist of Insensatez accepts his friend Erick’s proposal to revise the final version of a report about the genocide of the indigenous people of a Central American country.

And so, as he works in a small office that belongs to the city’s Archbishop, the protagonist must confront more than one thousand pages that tell the stories of survivors and witnesses. The horror both fascinates and overwhelms him, as he finds metaphors and expressions that vividly recreate the killings and other acts of cruelty that would otherwise be impossible to explain.

The everyday life of the protagonist occurs on the margin of that task. His reality is often frivolous and promiscuous and contrasts with the sensation of danger and harassment that takes over him.

With this book, Horacio Castellanos Moya stands out as one of the most important Central American writers with his command of narration, the use of a first-person narrator, and the never superficial subjects that are always perfectly interwoven in the plot.

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.