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Rest Is Silence
Rest Is Silence | Augusto Monterroso
1 post | 1 read
The lone novel by a Latin American author of very short fiction (praised as "the most beautiful stories in the world" by Italo Calvino)--an antic, metafictional send-up of the Mexican literary scene told through the unreliable recollections of an aging critic's friends, relatives, and attendants. The one and only novel by the renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso--Latin America's most expansive miniaturist, whose tiny, acid, and bracingly surreal narratives Italo Calvino dubbed "the most beautiful stories in the world"--The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres, a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity. Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres's friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant's own comically botched attempts at "criticism." Monterroso's narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author who is profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are--and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.
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Rest Is Silence | Augusto Monterroso
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NYRB comes through again 😸👍 I was not familiar with Monterroso before this and was pleasantly surprised by what I discovered. A hilarious compendium of works by and about the fictional writer Eduardo Torres, the bard of San Blas, Mexico. Poet, critic, essayist, and inveterate blowhard, Torres is a fully realized comic creation, a perfect send-up of provincial literary pomposity.