The Rest is Silence
by Augusto Monterroso
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Description
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 show more 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. Humor (Fiction.) Literature. Fiction. show less
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61+ Works 1,171 Members
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- Canonical title
- The Rest is Silence
- Original title
- Lo demás es silencio
- Original publication date
- 1982
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 863.64 — Literature & rhetoric Spanish Literature Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000
- LCC
- PQ7297 .M62 .D4 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures Spanish literature Provincial, local, colonial, etc. Spanish America
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 135
- Popularity
- 241,440
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.25)
- Languages
- English, Italian, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 1
