SENSELESSNESS, short and bitter and galvanizing...literary double espresso, genocide and atrocities oh my

SENSELESSNESS
HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA (tr. Katherine Silver)
New Directions
$15.95 trade paper & ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's a horrible, horrible story; it destroyed its narrator and bid fair to make me a whispering zombie; man's inexpressible vileness and irreducible cruelty are a weight too heavy for me to bear. His task is to copyedit a human-rights report commissioned by the Archbishop to ascertain the guilt and/or innocence of the parties to a genocide. Every step of the narrator's descent into mental illness's loudest darkest corners is punctuated by italicized phrases he's culled from this report...all one thousand one hundred pages...for their unusual, beautiful, euphonious horror: I am not complete in the mind greets the reader on page one. A man who lived beyond the violence that stole his family from him utters those words, to a psychologist, as the report takes shape, as the professional records the words and assesses the soul that left the body of the speaker, so as to bear witness.

I didn't read the original Spanish, but I'll wager there's nothing significant lost in Katherine Silver's translation. It's too precisely evocative. It's also extremely prolix in its one hundred forty-two pages. Words pile up, words wind around your eyestalks, words make dizzyingly alien geometries as they flow from the desperately purging narrator. Words distance him, though not the reader, from the blood and hate and evil he must view as structures and concepts in order to earn his five thousand United States dollars for copyediting one thousand one hundred pages of agony. The slaughter of untold bodies is actually the less revolting part of the tale...Wounded, yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful is not something a grandmother should have cause to say of her murdered descendants...and the litany of one thousand one hundred pages reminds us that the narrator is doing a job, is taking the written results of an investigation, is applying grammar and punctuation to the massive, traumatized shouting of the victims of genocide.

We all know who are the assassins.

SINCE MY LAST CONFESSION, fun and funny account of being a gay Catholic

SINCE MY LAST CONFESSION: A Gay Catholic Memoir
SCOTT POMFRET
Arcade Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Scott Pomfret serves as a lector at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston. He also writes gay porn. His boyfriend is a flaming atheist, and his boyfriend's Protestant grandmother counts Catholicism a sin worse than sodomy. From Pentecost to Pride, from the books of the Bible to the articles of The Advocate, Pomfret's wry, hysterically funny memoir maps with matchless humor the full spectrum of the gay Catholic experience.

Listen in as Pomfret learns a thing or two about love and compassion from Father Bear Daddy, a priest with a hot Gay.com profile, and the Three Hale Marys, and join him as he sets out on a brave quest to convince his arch-nemesis, Cardinal O'Malley, to invite him to serve at a weekly mass.

My Review: A gay Catholic engages with his native church. I am not Irish, as Pomfret is, but am gay (well, reasonably cheerful most of the time) and was Catholic (how awful that was); I suspected this would be a fun read. It was, though not only humor gets used to make his points. I mean, you get some great lines:

Brokenness is an opportunity for the spirit to enter.
–and–
Sin is a failure to love when you have the capacity to do so.
–and–
We come because we experience something of God at the Shrine, something that moves, a whisper, a current, in a setting that both rings true and is strangely unsettling, decidedly different, where listening is active if imperfect and where acts of corporal mercy always form part of the picture.

It was a pleasure to read a memoir about being Catholic and gay that wasn't a big ol' wad of misery. This was a book about Author Pomfret's relationship to one of the pillars of his identity as a man and a religious being. It wasn't, however, just a single book; it was a series of stand-up routines written by an out gay Irish Catholic Securities and Exchange Commission bureaucrat with an atheist boyfriend, on a self-assigned mission to save the Church from sinking into moral turpitude (too late!) under Bennie the Rat (Pope Benedict XVI, né Joseph Ratzinger) on the issue of gay marriage. Although the people have changed, notably Bennie the Rat who became the only pope in history to retire instead of die in harness who wasn't an Anti-Pope or under threat of death, the fight for liberalization in the church has not.

Fun, however, was definitely had. Straight people will get as many, if not more, chuckles out of this than will gay guys. The recurring trope Mr. Pomfret uses to describe himself (a colleague at the SEC put his photo in a lineup with the 20th century's ickiest serial killers, and asked people which person in the lineup looked like a lawyer; Pomfret, a lawyer, wasn't selected once) is funny the first few times, but loses punch quickly; likewise his cute nicknames for the people in his quest-story for Catholic gay marriage support. (Note: I read a Kindle edition of this book; for no obvious reason, there is no longer a Kindle edition available...?)

Read this book. It's good, but one SHOULD read it a chapter at a time between other books the way a careful reader does some themed anthologies of poems or stories (eg, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart or Fight Like a Girl. Otherwise, it's like eating carrot cake as your vegetable.

WANTED: ELEVATOR MAN by Joseph G. Peterson review live today at Entropy Magazine!

Rating: 3.5* of five

My latest review, WANTED: ELEVATOR MAN by Joseph G. Peterson, is live today at Entropy Magazine. Thanks, Switchgrass Books of Northern Illinois University Press, for sending me the review copy!

Perhaps the most representative quote is also the centerpiece of the story:

He felt entombed and stifled and desperately craved oxygen. He vainly raised the question: Why have you forsaken me?

'Call my mother,' he yelled. He had meant to say: I'm dying. Please call a priest.

The shadowy Presence, who had been in a panic, rushed over to him and, disregarding the fact that it was live, pushed the cable aside.

'You're alive,' the Presence said in breathless tones. 'Mamma's here to help.'

The elevator continued to descend, creating a vacuum. Barnes gasped for breath.

'Breathe in, breathe out,' the Presence urged. She tapped his pulse rapidly with two fingers. 'Come on, you can do it. One, two, three. Breathe in. Mamma's here to help.' ... In his delirium he thought that indeed his mother was here to help. However, in all of Barnes's twenty-nine years of so-called living, his mother had never come so comfortingly close as this.

This is quality reading. Seek it out.