So I finally made some time to dig into Augusto Monterroso’s lone novel, 1978’s The Rest Is Silence (trans. Aaron Kerner). It’s hardly a conventional novel (and seems very much of a piece with the other novel I’m reading right now, Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s 1967 novel Tres tristes tigres (in its 1971 translation as Three Trapped Tigers by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine). Both novels eschew traditional novelistic forms—no central narrator, no conventional plot, per se, polyglossia given rein over a controlling and unifying voice. I read the first fifty or so pages of The Rest Is Silence and look forward to digging in deeper.
From Dustin Illingworth’s introduction
Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence, a fictional Festschrife for a provincial Mexican Intellectual, teems with invented texts, imaginary writers, dubious footnotes, possible pseudonyms, and unreliable memories. The novel’s constituent parts reveal the social, culeural, and literary life of one Eduardo Torres, a writer and elder statesman of the fictional town of San Blas, Mexico, Its four sec-tions— grouped loosely into tributes, selected writings, aphorisms, and “impromptu collaborations” —make a case for compilation as a natural handmaiden to farce. The opening remarks from friends and family are largely hatchet jobs born of petty jealousy or long acquain-tance. The selections from Torres’s oeuvre—incredible misreadings, all-are bathetic, anodyne, lacking in sense, and almost invariably wrong. Yet the vivisection is marked by compassion as much as it is by savagery. Ferried by the risible figure of Torres, avatar of vanity and misjudgment, Monterroso smuggles a pocket autobiography within his deflation of Mexico’s literati. In the process, he forges one of the sublime fools of literature, a man whose commitment to delusion is itself a kind of glorious art.
Biblioklept 