The Dream of My Return

Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator — female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable — paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.

Castellanos Moya’s was acclaimed “an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art” () and “a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials” (Russell Banks).

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet parked across the street from his sister’s apartment. An unexpected turn of events causes Sosa to assume the other man’s identity. When he becomes the driver of the mysterious yellow Chevrolet, Sosa discovers that it is home to four poisonous snakes. With the snakes as accomplices, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on the city of San Salvador. is a macabre high-speed romp, in which violence and comedy become almost indistinguishable. The non-stop action raises provocative questions about social exclusion and the role of the media, but this novel by the author of the acclaimed Senselessness also evokes the tenderness of relations among those on society’s margins.

An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling his tale and ranting against everything his country has to offer. Written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard, was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolano called Castellanos Moya’s darkest book and perhaps his best: “A parody of certain works by Bernhard and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud.”

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.

Castellanos Moya’s most thrilling book to date, about the senselessness of tyranny.

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez — known as the Warlock — who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Haydée Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator’s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Haydée’s political awakening in diary entries and Clemente’s frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. — sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny — is an unforgettable incarnation of a country’s history in the destiny of one family.