Translation Rights TQE / Dance with Snakes

Baile con serpientes (Dance with Snakes) originally appeared published in El Salvador in 1996 and was published by Tusquets Editores Mexico in February 2002.  The warm response to this extraordinary work by critics and public convinced us to bring it to the Spanish public, as we did with El arma en el hombre (The Weapon in Man).  Castellanos Moya once said the following about Baile con serpientes during an interview:  “My novel is an dreamlike creation where the fantastic becomes blended with the real (…).  It is an obsessive novel because I did not stop until I finished it”.

One day a yellow Chevrolet from the fifties appears parked in the street.  Jacinto Bustillo, an odd homeless man who awakens the suspicions of the neighbours lives inside of it.  Eduardo Sosa decides to find out who he is and what he wants.  Due to patience or perhaps to solitude, Jacinto ends up accepting Sosa’s company.  Destiny, however, can change overnight:  Jacinto dies decapitated and a psychopath inherits the Chevrolet and its inhabitants:  a group of serpents with frozen eyes that act as if their souls are possessed, and begin to tell hallucinating stories about infidelities, jealousy and vengeance that rise to the murder and falling apart of entire lives.  Three voices – that of the crazed serpent leader, the policeman Handal and the reporter Rita Mena – narrate the delirium that climbs over the crime and that becomes wrapped in vertiginous police activity and a need for destruction that manifests the weak and corrupt foundations of the State.

About Baile con serpientes

“Baile con serpientes represents a superior turn in the trajectory of the Mexican-Salvadorian author.  The magnificent narrator that is Horacio Castellanos Moya reaches an impressive level”

Reforma, Mexico

“It is a fantastic and sarcastic crime story developed within the context of the urban chaos, social paranoia, and institutional decadence of any big city.”

Arturo Jiménez, La Jornada, México

“A rampant adventure novel that is on the verge of the crime fiction genre.  Baile con serpientes emits an acid criticism of society and of power circles from the trench of an exquisite and discerning surrealism.”

Mariana Islas, Mural, Mexico

“Baile con serpientes is a hallucinatory tale that rises until it reaches an uncontrollable frenzy of passions, hate, destruction, death (…).  Horacio Castellanos Moya is an essential Latin American narrator.”

El Semanario, México

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was brought up in El Salvador and has lived, since 1979, in different cities throughout America and Europe. He worked as a journalist in Mexico City for twelve years and lived in Frankfurt, Germany, as a guest writer of the International Frankfurt Book Fair. He currently teaches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has been invited as a guest professor at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of eight novels, six of which have been published by Tusquets, translated into several languages and critically acclaimed. In 2009 the English translation of his novel Insensatez (Senselessness) received the XXVIII Northern California Book Award.