Horacio Castellanos Moya Overview

Horacio Castellanos Moya is an adventurous and brave writer, but he is careful to cast his work in as distinctly different a light than these two adjectives would typically suggest as possible.  He is concerned with the ordinariness of the seemingly extraordinary, with what people do when they must address and engage in what they had known existed – massacre, genocide, war, murder, more quotidian acts of malice – but around which they never imagined they would have to operate in such close proximity.  What makes him adventurous and brave is that he considers the full extent of how people may respond to such situations; he delineates their outrage, their moral repulsion, but seems more interested in how habit and comfort inflect their new circumstances: they become frustrated, they resort to self-pity, they engage in more mindless pursuits that, in the hands of a lesser writer, may make them seem callous; under Castellanos Moya's watch, the humanity behind all of these responses – from the virtuous to the inane – are given equal, invested weight.  His work is often characterized as satire because of the contradictions he depicts between the mundanely personal and the horrific otherness of enormity; but perhaps he is just more interested in considering the capacious breadth of any response to an horrific experience.  He seems less interested in pointing out logical flaws in emotional responses than in chronicling these seemingly illogical emotional responses and placing them firmly in the peculiar rationality of human experience.