The brilliance of Mr. Castellanos Moya’s new novel, easily his best to appear in English so far, lies in how steadfastly it refuses to deploy those old tricks. In fact it often seems like a meditation on that refusal, edging toward the fantastic and then pulling back to offer credible ways — a bad hangover, a lost memory — to explain its characters’ disorientation. The result is a superbly flexible work: realistically enough plotted to ask for our whole involvement in its story, yet still full of the moments of slippage and dissociation that magical realism is so adept at evoking ... Erasmo obsesses primarily over his own problems, in flights of neurosis, fluidly translated by Katherine Silver, that are more reminiscent of the funny, self-loathing heroes of Philip Roth and Ralph Ellison than of any grimmer Latin American antecedent ... It has the intense aliveness of great fiction, the kind that gives human particularity to circumstances for which our sympathy might otherwise remain mostly notional.
His latest novel, The Dream of My Return, presents in compact and indelible form his tricks, his daring, his disgust, his humor ... Moya is a bold and accomplished craftsman. The Dream of My Return is told in the first-person past tense. The vocabulary and phrasing fit Erasmo perfectly, just as the rambling, pages-long paragraphs accord with the obsessive sequences of self-questioning and out-of-control mental wandering he succumbs to in his reflections. Everything is clear ... The new novel is a character study of one of the demoralized and still half-obtuse victims of past turbulence. Erasmo is unusually screwed up. What animates him is a sourceless conviction that going home again will remake him.
Deceptively brisk, and narrated in claustrophobic prose, the novel serves as a devastating corrective to the romanticism the 'Bolaño myth celebrates. Packed with poisonous observations about the hypocrisy of players on both ends of the political spectrum, it’s a slender tour-de-force: a rich, complex, beautifully crafted act of ventriloquism whose brevity belies its range ... each step forward occasions a leap back into its protagonist’s history, so the action becomes psychological ... Readers who prefer discrete scenes and a clear sense of advancing action might find themselves bogging down in Castellanos Moya’s prose ... Yet the manic intensity of Castellanos Moya’s prose yields the same pleasure as Thomas Bernhard’s, a clear influence...and the shift at the end of the narrative recalls the shift at the end of Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for a Child Not Born.
The deep-seated paranoia that permeates The Dream of My Return evokes this culture of persecution that has followed the exiles of El Salvador, who, we understand, could never have escaped mentally unscathed from a conflict punctuated by atrocities, espionage and psychological terrorism ... Such a weighty history could overwhelm a lesser character, but Erasmo does all he possibly can to avoid facing his past or present in a meaningful way, and so there are ample opportunities for humour and reflection. Moya’s fluid, witty prose brings splashes of magic realism to the narrative, providing a welcome space from which to observe the demons lurking in the backdrop of Erasmo’s everyday life ... A complex character, and sometimes not an entirely likeable one, he demonstrates how the internalisation of such profound fear and sadness can wreak havoc on a person’s psyche.
Castellanos Moya is a master of creating narrators who say things so wrong you can’t pick out the worst thing in them ... With The Dream of My Return he shows he deserves to be considered one of the most politically instructive of many politically engaged Latin American authors. That he has so explored so many of the problems when a nightmare becomes a mere foolish dream is the true triumph of storytelling over circumstance here, and it is of a kind Erasmo can only dream about.
What distinguishes The Dream of My Return from other Castellanos Moya novels, like Senselessness or She-Devil in the Mirror, is how he plays here with the myth of repression ... From the perils of memory it becomes a story of exiles still enmeshed in a past that continues to live within them. Politics shows itself to be a realm with its own unique memory problems ... What is impressive about The Dream of My Return is how it manages to have it both ways: to treat the Freudian psyche like the cheap myth it is, but to also show that when push comes to shove, we will rely on it because we need it ... Yet another satisfying variation on this theme, the book in which the author travels furthest into the Freudian psyche and in which he puts this dominant myth of our times to the harshest tests.
Every expectation established both by and for its protagonist, the journalist-in-exile Erasmo Aragon, is not just undermined, but abandoned . ... It's tempting to read into this a common narrative of exile – the manic, nostalgic pining for home – and to conflate that experience with Moya's own personal history ... The Dream of My Return is thrillingly labyrinthine in its manoeuvres between and away from accepted narratives, ratcheting into something like a pot-boiling mystery abandoned before its resolution – perhaps even before its climax ... It's invigorating to encounter a novel that, in both form and content, resists both the facile categorizations of the market and the formulaic obedience of more simplistic books
An exquisitely wry novel that builds on the infinite variations of anxiety as narrative force ... Moya has written a tight little novel that is wickedly witty and built on the idea of memory as a never-ending cause of inspiration and turmoil.
Stories of political turmoil, communism, love affairs, friendships, and family drama weave in and out of Aragon’s quest to escape his own 'psychic mechanisms.' In this taut, mesmerizing story of the brain’s far-reaching functions, Moya once again proves to be a master storyteller.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
