The Dream of My Return

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Overview

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador.

High-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home at the tail end of El Salvador's long civil war.

Is the plan a dream or a nightmare?

Is he courageous, foolhardy, or just plain dumb?

Is the bubbling brew of horrors and threats actual or imagined?

After he seeks relief for liver pain through hypnosis (while drinking more than ever, despite the treatments), his few impulse-control mechanisms rapidly dissolve, and reality only rarely intrudes on his cogitations. Harebrained murder plots, half-mad arguments, hysterical rants: the narrative escalates at a maniacal pace, infused with Horacio Castellanos Moya's uniquely outlandish and acerbic sense of humor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811223430
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/10/2015
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born 1957 in Honduras. He has lived in San Salvador, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico (where he spent ten years as a journalist, editor, and political analyst), Spain, and Germany. In 1988 he won the National Novel Prize from Central American University for his first novel. His work has been published and translated in England, Germany, El Salvador and Costa Rica. He has published ten novels and is now living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

There are dozens of moments in The Dream of My Return, the swift, stunning new novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya, when the reader expects its narrative to move toward the surreal…Like many contemporary Latin American novelists…he works within a certain familiar atmosphere of misgiving. These writers still owe some of their approach to magical realism, with its crucial insight that the hallucinatory logic of fabulism mirrors the feelings of nausea and dislocation that are inevitable in life under a dictatorship. But 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…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…The Dream of My Return…has the intense aliveness of great fiction, the kind that gives human particularity to circumstances for which our sympathy might otherwise remain mostly notional.

The New York Times - Charles Finch

★ 01/26/2015
Moya’s (Senselessness) lyrical meditation on memory and loss tells the story of Erasmo Aragon, an exiled journalist in Mexico City who suffers from ambiguous medical symptoms. Aragon visits an acupuncturist and holistic doctor named Don Chente, who prescribes hypnotherapy, with the side effect of producing vivid dreams. As the status quo of his life is disrupted, the narrator of this Bolañoesque novel dreams of leaving Mexico and returning to his native El Salvador. His plans to return, however, are repeatedly interrupted, and he finds himself twisted up in a state of fear and vulnerable paranoia. Further complications arise when the mysterious Don Chente himself flees to El Salvador without telling Aragon what he said while hypnotized. Yet Aragon’s dream is worth the risk of retribution, because it is the dream of all exiles: the return to a new life in a familiar setting. 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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Brilliant and devastating and incredibly beautiful."

Powells.com - Chris Faatz

"A welcome, eye-opening addition to this new literature of the Latin American nightmare."

Time Out New York - Anderson Tepper

"Brilliantly funny and unsettling… Castellanos Moya has turned anxiety into an art form and an act of rebellion, and redeemed paranoia as a positive indicator of rot."

The Nation - Natasha Wimmer

"Acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb."

Roberto Bolaño

03/01/2015
Born in 1957 in Honduras to a Honduran mother and a Salvadoran father, Castellanos Moya has written nine novels (e.g., Senselessness) that typically reflect the political instability of Central America. Although the author rejects the label "political writer," Erasmo Aragon, his journalist protagonist here, has fled El Salvador for the relative safety of Mexico and is obsessed with politics. Erasmo's excruciating stomach pain brings him to consult Dr. Chente Alvarado, a fellow Salvadoran who proposes hypnosis to help him. Meanwhile, hoping to end his tempestuous relationship with Eva, Erasmo plans to leave Mexico to start a magazine back in San Salvador. When Dr. Chente himself returns to San Salvador for the funeral of his mother, Erasmo begins to doubt the wisdom of his decision, fearing that the leftist doctor might be attacked by goons at the airport or that he might betray the confidences from their sessions together to the authorities. Did the doctor really abandon his ideals when he married an oligarch, and did he really collaborate with the CIA in the Sixties? VERDICT Erasmo's ever-more-imaginative paranoic rants, along with the zany conviction that every shapely woman he sees has the unique ability to salve and soothe him, makes reading this novel a pure delight.—Jack Shreve, Chicago

Library Journal

2015-01-08
An exquisitely wry novel that builds on the infinite variations of anxiety as narrative force.A hypochondriac journalist living in Mexico visits a doctor for pain in his overwrought liver, and the history of a life is examined. He wants to return to El Salvador now that peace seems to be settling in, especially now that his wife has confessed to having an affair. The doctor is more of an alchemist, and the setting is surreal—an elegant penthouse where women drink tea and play canasta. Don Chente is a doctor, acupuncturist, psychologist and homeopath in one; he asks personal questions that probe the journalist's intentions. Hypnosis opens memories, real or imagined, from the patient's childhood—of his father and of the murderous politics that sent him and his uncle Muñecón into self-imposed exile in Mexico 11 years earlier. His dream of returning to his homeland is a self-inflated vision of the brave journalist reporting the sordid facts of the revolution when in reality the turmoil is about over. Mysteriously, Don Chente disappears, and the journalist is now driven by needs that include discovering what the doctor learned from him while he was under hypnosis. Paranoia creeps in as he envisions the doctor as a political informant. A drunken romp through Mexico City ensues, and when Erasmito, the journalist named only once in the novel, in a memory, passes through security at the airport, he sees his doctor passing him on his way back into Mexico. He erupts with anxiety; he is hopeless, helpless, and his life is a never-ending cycle of hypochondria, paranoia and the absurd. 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.

Kirkus Reviews