The Rest Is Silence
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
