The testimonio of one of Latin America’s leading writers, Truck of Fools is a searing personal account of incarceration and torture. It recalls the author’s thirteen years as a political prisoner of Uruguay’s neofascist regime during the 1970s and 1980s. An acutely perceptive poet-novelist, Carlos Liscano offers unique insight into not only the physical and psychological plight of the prisoner but also the mindset of his tormentors.

Composed as a series of brief, mostly non-sequential vignettes, Truck of Fools combines memories both painful and poignant with passages that contemplate what enforced solitude and systematically inflicted pain do to the mind and body. The author’s recollections of childhood and interactions with his captors and fellow prisoners, his descriptions of specific tortures and interrogations, his meditations on the human will to survive and the equally human capacity for evil—such parts form a powerful mosaic that is often horrifying, yet just as often inspiring. ''The prisoner,'' Liscano writes, ''holds onto something beyond the rational, the definable. Dignity sustains him.''

The first major work by Liscano to appear in English, this book also includes an essay, ''A Life without Object(s),'' in which the author reflects on how the brutalities of prison corrupt and distort language. Repudiating such debasements of ''the word,'' Truck of Fools is the eloquent memoir of a man who managed to reclaim his voice, who learned the value of words that speak the truth, of words that ''should be saved so they can save us.''

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