Thrillers

The She-Devil in the Mirror from Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of the choices in John O'Connell thriller review roundup.

An intriguing, nuanced thriller set in San Salvador in the early 1990s after the end of the civil war, this was originally published there 10 years ago. Our narrator is a wealthy 30-year-old divorcee, Laura Rivera, whose best friend Olga Maria has just been murdered. In a series of gossipy, increasingly manic rants delivered over a six-week period in a variety of settings – at a wake; on the phone; driving to the cemetery for Olga Maria's funeral – Laura floats her theories and quickly proves herself to be as devious as she is paranoid. The identity of her addressee remains a mystery throughout. It certainly isn't the reader: we're eavesdropping on these monologues, a fact that both tantalises and implicates us. Silver's fine translation sustains tension admirably, though I wondered if Laura was even more objectionable (because easier to locate socially) in the original Spanish.

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Horacio Castellanos Moya: Senselessness

Jed Lipinski reviews Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness.

Senselessness is the eighth novel by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya and, remarkably, the first to appear in English. Moya has been hailed as El Salvador's foremost novelist, and Senselessness, published in Spanish in 2004, took only four years to arrive in the States—not a bad track record, considering that Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, released here last fall, was first published in 1998.

A chaptered but nearly paragraphless 142 pages, Senselessness reads like a vicious, novella-length rant by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard—had Bernhard spent his developmental years drinking mescal in a corrupt, oppressively Catholic Latin America and having sex with passionate Spanish women. Bernhard's influence is obvious, like Joyce's influence on Flann O'Brien and J.P. Donleavy, but never burdensome. By filtering Bernhard's addled consciousness through his own, and steeping it in the humidity of a thinly disguised Guatemala, the novel provides a kind of meta-analysis of the neurotic Austrian master—though it stands alone, too, as an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art.

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Salvadoran Literature