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 critics friends, relatives, and attendants. The one and only novel by the renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto MonterrosoLatin Americas most expansive miniaturist, whose tiny, acid, and bracingly surreal narratives Italo Calvino dubbed the most beautiful stories in the worldThe 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 Torress friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savants own comically botched attempts at criticism. Monterrosos 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 areand, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.