The Rest Is Silence

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. (Dec.)