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.
"Monterroso was a very real Honduran-Guatemalan short-story writer, his 1978 novel here skilfully translated into English for the first time by Aaron Kerner. Torres was the product of his imagination, a chance to poke fun at the literary establishment and speculate on the legacy afforded to a provincial writer with an output unlikely to stand the test of time." —Chris Alnutt, The Financial Times
“The reader is warned to approach Monterroso with hands raised—these are dangerous [fictions], whose ostensible lightness is founded upon a clandestine wisdom, a lethal beauty.” —Gabriel García Marquez
“Monterroso is the first truly original philosopher that Latin America has produced.” —José Emilio Pacheco
"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." — Publishers Weekly
For more than 19 years, Monterroso had cultivated Torres as a literary heteronym—an obscure literary term for an authorial persona that takes a life separate from its creator, publishing essays, poetry, or even books in the real world….Strange and fragmented manuscripts like The Rest is Silence…show us how to make room for all the voices that live inside of us. — Jason Boog
“Yes, Torres is an example of the via errata for critics. But along with that there’s the novel’s vision of a compromise-minded bloviator who is admired among the chattering classes. Monterroso is out to bag not just Torres, but a play-it-safe cultural community that hails reviewers for not being critical…” — Bill Marx, Art Fuse
"Reading The Rest Is Silence is both a delight and a reality check for the reader who takes books and writers too seriously. In this metaliterary game, questioning if Eduardo Torres is indeed a brilliant, larger-than-life intellectual—even if that is only within the small city of San Blas—or simply an incompetent book-obsessed man, the only winner is, and will always be, the reader." —Efrén Ordóñez Garza, Southwest Review
Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) was a Honduran-born Guatemalan writer. A prominent member of the Latin American Boom generation, he was known for his humorous and ironic short stories. He is the recipient of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the National Literature Award of Guatemala.
Aaron Kerner completed an MFA at Emerson College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he works as an English teacher at the Commonwealth School. He translated Benedetta Craveri’s The Last Libertines for New York Review Books in 2020.
Dustin Illingworth’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler, New Left Review, Poetry, and The Point.
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.
Praise
"Monterroso was a very real Honduran-Guatemalan short-story writer, his 1978 novel here skilfully translated into English for the first time by Aaron Kerner. Torres was the product of his imagination, a chance to poke fun at the literary establishment and speculate on the legacy afforded to a provincial writer with an output unlikely to stand the test of time." —Chris Alnutt, The Financial Times
“The reader is warned to approach Monterroso with hands raised—these are dangerous [fictions], whose ostensible lightness is founded upon a clandestine wisdom, a lethal beauty.” —Gabriel García Marquez
“Monterroso is the first truly original philosopher that Latin America has produced.” —José Emilio Pacheco
"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." — Publishers Weekly
For more than 19 years, Monterroso had cultivated Torres as a literary heteronym—an obscure literary term for an authorial persona that takes a life separate from its creator, publishing essays, poetry, or even books in the real world….Strange and fragmented manuscripts like The Rest is Silence…show us how to make room for all the voices that live inside of us. — Jason Boog
“Yes, Torres is an example of the via errata for critics. But along with that there’s the novel’s vision of a compromise-minded bloviator who is admired among the chattering classes. Monterroso is out to bag not just Torres, but a play-it-safe cultural community that hails reviewers for not being critical…” — Bill Marx, Art Fuse
"Reading The Rest Is Silence is both a delight and a reality check for the reader who takes books and writers too seriously. In this metaliterary game, questioning if Eduardo Torres is indeed a brilliant, larger-than-life intellectual—even if that is only within the small city of San Blas—or simply an incompetent book-obsessed man, the only winner is, and will always be, the reader." —Efrén Ordóñez Garza, Southwest Review
Author
Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003) was a Honduran-born Guatemalan writer. A prominent member of the Latin American Boom generation, he was known for his humorous and ironic short stories. He is the recipient of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the National Literature Award of Guatemala.
Aaron Kerner completed an MFA at Emerson College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he works as an English teacher at the Commonwealth School. He translated Benedetta Craveri’s The Last Libertines for New York Review Books in 2020.
Dustin Illingworth’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler, New Left Review, Poetry, and The Point.
