Horacio Castellano Moya's "Tyrant Memory" [Read This Next]

Following up on my last post, it’s a pleasure to announce that the first Read This Next selection is Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver and available later this month from New Directions.

I’ve been a fan of Horacio’s ever since I read Senselessness, an absolutely stunning book about a man hired to edit a 1,100-page report of the atrocities committed by the military against the indigenous population. It’s haunting and beautiful and tight and paranoid. (See this review for more detailed info.)

Since that time, Biblioasis published his novel Dance with Snakes and New Directions did She-Devil in the Mirror. Although Senseless still stands supreme in my mind, both of those books are extremely interesting and cemented Horacio’s reputation as one of today’s most exciting and talented authors.

So when we decided to create Read This Next it seemed absolutely perfect to kick things off with Horacio’s new book, Tyrant Memory. This novel is a bit different than the others that have come out in English translation, mostly because it features three different narrators and styles. (The other three books are all first-person narratives.) It’s a “bigger” book in some senses, seeing that it deals with the coup and strike that lead to the overthrow of the Warlock, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in 1944.

Here’s New Direction’s jacket copy:

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez — known as the Warlock — who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Haydée Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator’s death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Haydée’s political awakening in diary entries and Clemente’s frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. Tyrant Memory — sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny — is an unforgettable incarnation of a country’s history in the destiny of one family.

You can access the online preview of Tyrant Memory by clicking here, and you can purchase the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, and Powell’s at those links.

Enjoy!