Senselessness
A Rainmaker Translation Grant Winner from the Black Mountain Institute
- Traduttore:
- Silver, Katherine
- EAN:
9780811217071
- ISBN:
0811217078
- Pagine:
- 160
- Formato:
- Paperback
- Lingua:
- Inglese
Descrizione Senselessness
A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger-after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.