Born in Honduras in 1957 and raised in El Salvador, Horacio Castellanos Moya attended college in Toronto. He returned to El Salvador in 1980 in the teeth of a popular uprising against the government and witnessed the massacre of unarmed students and workers which prompted him to travel to Costa Rica and then Mexico where he became a journalist.

When it came time to write novels, his list includes Senseless, a tale of a sex-obsessed alcoholic writer hired by the Catholic Church to clean up a lengthy government report on the torture and eventual slaughter of thousands of innocent villagers; She-Devil in the Mirror where a woman investigates the cold blooded murder of her best friend, a murder taking place in her friend’s own living room in front of her two young daughters; Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, written as a furious one paragraph rant on the injustices committed against the people of El Salvador, a book that earned the novelist death threats.

One work of the author's I find especially compelling is his short story Confinement where we listen in on what goes through the mind of an El Salvador guerrilla in hiding, confined to a room in a home of a family sympathetic to his cause. The guerrilla feels trapped in the hot room; he’d like to have a drink. If he could live his life over again, he’d live exactly as his instincts dictate; after all, he joined the revolution out of instinct, like a tiger sniffing out its prey. And when he gets out? He’d be happy, ready to dive back into the city, a good thing, like being born again.

In The Dream of My Return we likewise listen in on the thoughts of a man in crisis, this time its Erasmo, a journalist from El Salvador who is currently living in exile in Mexico City. Erasmo shares much in common with that guerrilla in hiding: he experiences exile as a confinement; he yearns to dive back into his native El Salvador and thus be reborn as the new Erasmo; last but hardly least, he could use a drink.

Actually, there’s more than just Erasmo’s thoughts – we also listen in on his conversations with his family and fellow exiles and follow his movements and actions in and around Mexico City. But since there are no breaks in the long paragraphs from first page to last, it’s as if dialogue and discussion, events and encounters are all contained within the journalist’s stream-of-consciousness, as if the outside world is compressed inside Erasmo - the mind as restricted to a hot room; the mind as insurgent guerrilla.

I read The Dream of My Return over the course of two weeks. At 135 pages the novel is short enough to finish in one or two sittings but I wanted to remain with the narrator, suffering through his crisis, feeling the full impact of his plight as he lives in a pressure cooker with the temperature turned up again and again in all sorts of ways. And that’s all sorts of ways as in the following:

Suspicion, Paranoia, Fear: Erasmo can’t go to a doctor without sensing he could be poisoned; he can’t converse with his fellow Salvadorians without looking around to see if any of the men or women in the room are enemy informants. After all, there are so many enemies – agents of the El Salvador military government and the American CIA, to name just two.

Drinking: In many respects, Erasmo is his own worst enemy – he knows he shouldn’t drink; fueled by alcohol, he might fly into a rage and usually wind up returning home only to pass out on the living room couch and wake up the next morning with a pounding headache and intolerable stomach pains. But he has oh so many issues to deal with and having a drink is such an enjoyable, effective quick fix, at least in the short term.

Doctor Visits: One of the more fascinating parts of the novel finds our journalist in intense physical agony, forcing him to seek out an old retired friend of the family, a physician by the name of Don Chente who convinces his patient to undergo hypnosis. But there are consequences of his hypnosis sessions: having vivid nightmares as well as “telling the story of my life had turned into an unanticipated labor that threatened to foment dangerous internal chaos.” If this isn’t enough, Erasmo continually conjectures what he might have revealed under hypnosis, reason to cause even further alarm.

Memory: Discussions with Don Chente lead to past memories, including how his father was shot in the back for political reasons, how his maternal grandmother turning him against his mother and most especially his father, a man she hated even after he was murdered. A one point he acknowledges he was “a traumatized child who broke out in tears of dread at the shriek of a siren.”

Dissolved marriage: His relationship with wife Eva has turned into unending torment – fanning the fires of domestic hell is Eva admitting she had an affair with an actor by the name of Antolín. And there’s his little daughter Evita pulling at his heartstrings.

Murder: Erasmo discusses with Mr. Rabbit, a former Salvadorian guerrilla, his wish to kill the man who turned him into a cuckold - the actor Antolín. Was this wise? Mr. Rabbit swings into action and hands Erasmo the hot chamber of the weapon he used to do the deed. Now the anxious journalist has even more worries.

The Return: He must be nuts!! Does he really plan to take a flight to his home land where chances are he will be greeted at the airport by military police and promptly lead to prison where he will be tortured and shot? But then again, El Salvador might be just the place to rejuvenate his guilt-racked life. His makes his final decision but not until the very last paragraph. In this way, Horacio Castellanos Moya has written a thriller. ( )

I get it, I got it, I'm gone.

A short, sometimes humorous, very intense, surrealistic novel about a Salvadorian exile in Mexico. His life is a mess. He has decided that the fighting is almost over and it will be safe to return to El Salvador. Most of the novel is a rambling narrative of his anxieties about the trip, his deteriorating love relationship, and his memories of the deaths of family and friends caught up in political struggles. Library book. ( )

Moya wrote Senseless. While I only read the first few pages, clearly it was a tour de force since it dealt with someone detailing the atrocities of the dirty war in El Salvador. This features the same narrator, the drunken exaggerating first person dissolute, but because so much less is at stake the book fails. I just didn't care and as far as self destructive paranoia this came off as Hunter Thompson lite. The character claims he needs to go back to his home country of El Salvador and then gets the willies because the war, while seeming to be about spent, isn't over and wouldn't he run the risk of being arrested and killed? Meanwhile he is seeking a cure from a hypnotist Doctor because his stomach is freaking out due to alcohol consumption. The main character is hysterical and wildly digressive, but again because its all internal and more neurotic than consequential, we just can't invest. ( )