Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador - Softcover

Castellanos Moya, Horacio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811225399 ISBN 13: 9780811225397

Publisher: New Directions, 2016

Synopsis

The 1997 novel that put Horacio Castellanos Moya on the map, now published for the first time in English

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, Revulsion was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolano called Revulsion 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.”

About this title

About the Author:

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born 1957 in Honduras. He has lived in San Salvador, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico (where he spent ten years as a journalist, editor, and political analyst), Spain, and Germany. In 1988 he won the National Novel Prize from Central American University for his first novel. His work has been published and translated in England, Germany, El Salvador and Costa Rica. He has published ten novels and is now living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Lee Klein’s fiction, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in various publications. His novel The Shimmering Go-Between was published in 2014 by Atticus Books.

Review:

“The novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, an exile from El Salvador, seems permanently transfixed by arbitrary terror. His novels, five of which have been translated into English, chart the lives of those thrown into what Roberto Bolano called Latin America’s “Secret Vietnam.” As in the purest of Greek tragedies (Moya calls Sophocles one of his favorite writers), his slim, exacting books operate according to the shifting logic of distant, mysterious forces. The Olympian gods were the original aimless authority; the various players in Latin America’s civil wars, with their capricious interests, capacity for violence, and callous indifference to suffering, are the gods’ modern incarnations.”
- Michael LaPointe, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Brilliantly mordent.”
- The Australian

“Castellanos Moya has turned anxiety into an art form and an act of rebellion, and redeemed paranoia as a positive indicator of rot.”
- Natasha Wimmer, The Nation

“Acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb.”
- Roberto Bolano

“An intense writer, whose short novels take fierce satiric hold of a fictional concept and squeeze and squeeze.”
- James Wood, The New Yorker

“A welcome eye-opening addition to this new literature of the Latin American nightmare.”
- Anderson Tepper, Time Out New York

“Humor amid the madness and evil. Don’t let the breezy, often funny and frequently irreverent tone fool you.”
- John Greenya, Washington Times

“Even nineteen years on, the book’s atmosphere of exasperated rage feels itchy, jagged, and real.”
- The Paris Review

“From a political perspective, Revulsion has a lot to teach us... It may be a gift, and it is very comforting, but lonely anger won’t help you in the end.”
- The New Inquiry

“Operating as both a parody and a darkly funny, explosive rant of a man who detests his homeland, it’s a blistering novella that satisfies the darkness clouding the cynical side of our souls.”
- Numéro Cinq

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0811225399
• ISBN 13: 9780811225397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128