Moya's famous pastiche, written in the style of the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard and published for the first time in English, ranting against the ills of San Salvadorian society.
...astonishingly good ... [Moya] offers up a rendition of Bernhard that retains the Austrian’s hallmark acid social commentary and bitter laughs, and yet is also so true to its source material that it manages to reveal as much about Bernhard’s style as it does about Salvadoran society.
It is a nearly perfect ventriloquism. Moreover, by converting Bernhard into a genre that can be accented to malign any hometown and its population of fakes and ignoramuses, Moya elevates hate to an international language.
Revulsion is quite funny, actually, in a dark, droll way. In confronting tragedy, Castellanos Moya wrote toward comedy. Towing the line between horror and laughter is where he most like Thomas Bernhard ... The novel is perhaps not a perfect pastiche, then, at least in translation ... Having said that, weighing in under 90 pages, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador is too short?—?and too funny, and too weird, and too angry?—?to be a waste of time.
