The Rest Is Silence

October 7, 2024
Guatemalan short story writer Monterroso (The Black Sheep and Other Fables) skewers a self-important man of letters in this waggish satire, originally published in 1978. Eduardo Torres, a grotesque big fish in a small pond, flatters politicians in the little Mexican town where he lives and condescends to his obsequious secretary, who is one of the book’s several narrators along with Torres’s long-suffering wife and his suicidal older brother. Monterroso also treats readers to Torres’s uninspiring literary opinions and creative efforts, including his scrupulous misreading of Don Quixote, tone-deaf appeals to feminism, and bizarre animal drawings (Torres appears never to have seen a wolf). The novel concludes with a collection of aphorisms that Torres attributes to himself, which range from platitudinous (“The imagination is more fantastical than reality”) to sophomoric (about virginity: “You have to use it in order to lose it”). There’s also an unctuous afterword in which Torres thanks the reader. Monterroso, who died in 2003, fashions his anti-novel into a sly parody of both the gentleman of letters archetype and a backwater literary scene during the Latin American Boom. Readers will relish this tragic farce.

November 1, 2024
A Guatemalan writer best known for short fiction that Italo Calvino called "the most beautiful stories in the world," Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003) published one novel, this subtle comedy-of-errors. Ostensibly a celebration of provincial literary critic Eduardo Torres, it includes entries by friends, family, even his valet. This is a send-up of those who can't stop talking even though they have one foot in the mouth already; to know one is wrong is never what one wants to be right about. From the epigraph onward, the book is a series of mistakes, malapropisms, misattributions, misrepresentations, and misunderstandings. The valet puts it best, "impossible to say with any certainty whether at bottom the doctor was a vulgarian, a humorist, a sage, or a fool," before concluding Torres couldn't avoid being all of the above. Living in an imaginary small town, Torres is the proverbial big fish in a mud puddle, his criticism classic examples of pettifogging pedantry. The pleasure comes from the distinctive voices of each character as, charged with remembering the ostensible subject, they eloquently reveal their own vanity.

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