The Rest is Silence

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.

Augusto Monterosso (1921–2003) was a writer of Honduran and Guatemalan descent known best for his very short stories, praised as “the most beautiful stories in the world” by Italo Calvino. A central figure of the Latin American Boom generation in the 1960s and 1970s, he lived more than half of his life in Mexico City, where in 1944 he was exiled for his opposition against the Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico. He won several major literary awards during his lifetime, including the 1997 Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.

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.