El Salvador is in the middle of Central America:
Honestly I didn't really know where it was.
Summary:
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.
The first thing I noticed about this book is that the author was apparently trying to see how few periods he could use. I'm not being dramatic-he would use half a page with one sentence. Dude, if you have to use twenty commas, you need to revise. It seriously stressed me out. Then I realized how short the book was and decided I could suck it up.
The mental anguish of having to proof the report seemed very real, and through the villagers' phrases, you could absolutely imagine how it would take a toll. He became obsessed with relaying these phrases to others and wanting them to see the beauty in them. He wasn't a terribly likable character. But as far as the real danger...I didn't get that feeling till the very end. It seemed more like the narrator was just becoming really paranoid.
As I looked more into it people said that the unnamed Latin American country was most likely Guatemala. So not only was it a mediocre book, it wasn't even set in the right country. I really need to do better at vetting them.
I also had kind of a wave of tiredness come over me when I sat down (on the floor of a sad, mostly empty room since we're in the process of moving) to write this. Why am I doing it? Who cares? I guess it's kind of a way to keep track of the books I've read, but really I could just make a list of them. I dunno. I'm in a funk right now because of the move and everything else that's going on in the world, so I'm not going to stop doing all this right now. But we'll see. Time to vet some new books I guess.
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