The She-Devil In The Mirror

Horacio Castellanos Moya

Partly because my new novel, Tulum, is told by a fictional, first person narrator, I’m particularly interested in fiction with similar narrators. I didn’t initially know that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2000 novel The She-Devil In The Mirror (La Diabola En La Espejo) was in this category. I was reading it because of my enjoyment of another book by Moya, Senselessness. I wrote about Senselessness in May.

Imagine my delight. The novel’s narrator is female, privileged, Salvadoran ruling class, obsessive, garrulous, intuitive, and ultimately not reliable. Prompted by excitement and panic, she talks faster and faster, a mile a minute. She babbles on and on. But, alas, she’s headed for a crash. In post-civil war Salvador, her friend is killed, the hit man is arrested, but then the real search begins: who is the "mastermind," who put out the contract. Why was her friend murdered? There will be no spoiler here. The book is short, fast paced, very funny, very dark, and ultimately, quite frightening.

As Francisco Goldman notes in a blurb, the narrator “reveals more about intractable corruption, impunity and pure eveil in her country than the usual narrators of such stories – terse, noirish, knowing detectives or journalists, for example -- ever could.” That's a surprise. Ordinarily, the reader expects corruption, impunity, and abuse to be exposed by the victims. Or the investigators. But it turns out surprisingly that Moya's narrator is uniquely situated to reveal all of it. It becomes immediately clear why so many people have fled the country.

Highly recommended.

Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez (Senselessness)

Horacio Castellanos Moya

Don’t miss this novel. Set in an unnamed Central American country (probably Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez (Senselessness in English) is a short, first person narrative that will make you quake. It is filled with the menace, horror, corruption and danger of the many small “republics” in this hemisphere where “military intelligence” has been a synonym for death, torture and disappearance, and in which the indigenous population has been decimated by decades long “anti-insurgency” campaigns focusing on them.

There is no spoiler here. That would be unfair. The narrator, a foreigner, is hired by the Catholic Church to edit a 1,100 page testimony of the torture of the indigenous population by the military which the Bishop plans to release to the public. The manuscript is filled with the spellbinding, poetic voices of the survivors. The narrator, like the first testimony he reads, “is not complete in the mind.” Is he paranoid? Is he in danger? Is he both?

I read this book in one sitting; it’s that moving.

Roberto Bolano had it right when he wrote of Moya’s work

One of the great virtues of [his work] is that nationalists of all stripes can’t stand it. Its sharp humor, not unlike a Buster Keaton firlm or a time bomb, threatens the fragile stability of impeciles, who, when they read [his books], have an uncontrollable desire to hand the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

Moya, who was born in Honduras in 1957 and moved to El Salvador as a child, is presently living and working and writing in Pittsburgh.

There are two other works available in English translation. Don’t miss them either.