One index of the death or life of the novel must be its political relevance, and it’s no coincidence that the repeated flourishing of Latin-American literature has a lot to do with that region’s seemingly bottomless reserve of war and strife. The most recent flourishing — at least as it appears to an English-language reader — centers on Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), a Chilean who fictionalized the catastrophes of not only his home country but of Mexico and, in “Nazi Literature in the Americas,” of the entire Western Hemisphere.

Now his literary cousins are being translated — Horacio Castellanos Moya’s “Senselessness” (New Directions, 160 pages, $15.95) comes from Bolaño’s American publisher, New Directions, with a lengthy blurb by Bolaño on its back cover. As a stylist, Mr. Moya (b. 1957) does not especially resemble Bolaño, but as a storyteller he is similar. In structure and in length, “Senselessness” recalls “By Night in Chile” or “Distant Star,” two of Bolaño’s most compact novels. All three works give the narrative to an increasingly unreliable witness of political violence who, through some quirk of literary ambition or intellectual research, has learned too much.

Mr. Moya’s unnamed narrator, an exiled editorialist from an unnamed country, has taken up a copyediting job in what appears to be Guatemala. His employer is the Catholic Church, and his job is sensitive: 1,100 pages that document the mass murder of that country’s indigenous Indians by the military.

Though he distrusts the church, our hero naturally sympathizes with the Indians. He responds especially to their oral testimonies:

“The houses they were sad because no people were inside them […] Our houses they burned, our animals they ate, our children they killed, the women, the men, ay! ay! . . . . Who will put back all the houses?”

The skeptical reader might call such sentences cute, but the narrator compares them to the work of the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892-1939), himself associated with indigenous cultures, whose deceptively primitive syntax has famously confounded English translators. It is to translator Katherine Silver’s credit that she has brought Mr. Moya’s artfully awkward Spanish into artfully awkward English; but Mr. Moya does not intend us to quite equate these snippets with poetry — rather, they are the first signs of the narrator’s unhealthy relationship to the text.

He begins to resent his employers, throwing a temper tantrum when he’s not paid on time, forming suspicions about possible conspiracies between the military and the Vatican, and despairing of completing his work. At his most unhinged, he commits atrocities of his own, in his mind; he even imagines wheeling a newborn in the air by its heel, like “David’s sling.”

Mr. Moya circles around obsessions, displaying a characteristic Spanish grandiloquence that will remind readers of Javier Marías’s marvelously long-winded detective stories. Toward the end of his ordeal, the overstrained copy editor decides that even an office dalliance could end in death:

You’re not going to tell him about us, I whispered cautiously, for my fear had by now become too much, knowing that the girl falling asleep beside me was the f—ing property of a soldier, s—, that I was on the verge of sliding away headlong on a sled of terror and was searching blindly for the tiniest branch to grab onto […] sooner rather than later she would reveal our relationship to the soldier, and he would react like any cuckolded man, with the same blind rage, but even worse given the fact that we were talking about a soldier accustomed to resolving his problems through the use of arms.

These sentences do not introduce any new information, but they create a humor and a sense of mental space, as we get inside the head of a terrified narrator whose paranoid loops never fail to corral our attention. In his blurb, Bolaño writes of Mr. Moya’s work that it “threatens the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read [his books], have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square.” It is just such a laurel that frightens Mr. Moya’s narrator. But the reader does not experience the fright so much as the verbal bounce of Mr. Moya’s well-sprung prose and the classic downward spiral of a farcical male.

In many ways a black comedy, “Senselessness” is still a political book. Its angry confessional could be the work of an American writer in the vein of Philip Roth, whose character Mickey Sabbath comes to mind, but Mr. Moya’s chief demons are political, not sexual. His narrator occasionally alludes to conquistadors, and we are reminded that the military murder of indigenous peoples is an old story in Guatemala and elsewhere. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that, although the Spanish outlawed novels in the New World, their highly unreliable chronicles were actually the first Latin-American fictions. These tales of blood, gore, and racial horror bear direct influence on contemporary writers such as Bolaño and Mr. Moya, who so inevitably put confused chroniclers at the heart of their books.

blytal@nysun.com