Revulsion
Page 3
It’s interesting that Revulsion didn’t exhaust my luck. Despite the threats and my absence, the little book continued to be published every year in El Salvador by a small and valiant publisher, and thanks to one of those twists of fate it ultimately was taught in the university. Soon various copies left for neighboring countries. On more than one occasion—in some bar in Antigua, Guatemala, or in San José, Costa Rica, or in Mexico City—I was introduced to people who expressed admiration for the book and asked me if I would write a Revulsion about their respective countries, so to speak, a novel in the style of Thomas Bernhard that would critically demolish their country’s culture. Of course I always excused myself, I told them that I had already done my work, mentioning without breaking into a smile, that some countries would require many more pages to complete their Revulsion and I was a writer of short novels.
Two years after the threats, in the summer of 1999, I returned with caution to San Salvador for a few days to see my family and take care of some red tape. In a restaurant I encountered a lawyer, an old acquaintance, who worked for an international human rights organization. “What are you doing here? You want them to kill you?” he asked with a gesture that could have been consternation or black humor. The following day I visited various friends, who to my surprise all told me that I had to write the sequel to Revulsion, because the country was worse than ever: the political corruption, the organized crime, the gangs, the loss of the value of life . . .
But then I had other literary plans. With Revulsion, a fact was reconfirmed: thanks to their work, some writers earn money, others obtain fame, and some writers only make enemies. After the publication of my first novel The Diaspora that addressed the rot of the leftist Salvadoran revolutionaries during the civil war, I had become part of this latter group. To tell the truth I was tired of that existence. But as Robert Walser said to his editor Carl Seelig: “You can’t confront your own country with impunity.” Years later, despite having published many other novels since then, on various topics in which I didn’t imitate any writer, and not having written the sequel that some asked me to write, for Salvadorans, I remain uniquely and exclusively the author of Revulsion. Like a stigma, the little imitation novel and its aftermath pursue me.
Copyright © 1997, 2007 Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translation copyright © 2016 Lee Klein
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Published by arrangement with Tusquets Editores, Barcelona.
Originally published in Spanish as El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador by Tusquets Editores.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1344) in 2016
eISBN 9780811225403
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Also by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Warning
Revulsion
Author’s Note
Copyright