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The Rest Is Silence

The Rest Is Silence

by Augusto Monterroso, translated from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, introduction by Dustin Illingworth

$16.95
$16.95
Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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The January 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681378824
Pages: 176
Publication Date:

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

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