The Incompetence of a Well-Read Man
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By Efrén Ordóñez Garza
What is the point of reading? How much value does the accumulation of books read add to a person? Is reading just the act of decoding and interpreting symbols? Is it quantifiable? If we agree that reading provides us with knowledge, applicable knowledge, and the more the better, we should then assume that the person who has read the most would be the smartest or the wisest. Hence, someone who reads and writes for a living would never find the absurd in the accumulation of pages read or in the practical use for a head full of letters. But should they?
Augusto “Tito” Monterroso, the Guatemalan writer born in Honduras and later exiled in Mexico, is probably best known for his seven-word short story. If you haven’t heard of him, I’m sure you know this one or a variation of it:
“El dinosaurio”
Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
“The Dinosaur”
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
A masterful humorist, Monterroso is a cornerstone of Latin American literature. His first book, published in 1959 when he was almost forty years old, was titled Obras completas y otros cuentos, published in English as Complete Works and Other Stories, translated by Edith Grossman and published by the University of Texas Press. The title itself reveals his tendency toward satire. He would go on to publish a series of hybrid books, works that escaped the most obnoxious and marketable labels needed to find a place in bookstores. Monterroso played with form and resisted classification, but never for the mere act of disrupting. There’s always the mind of a philosopher behind the page.
The same is true of The Rest Is Silence, which is labeled the author’s “first and only novel.” Originally published in Spanish in 1978, this “novel” is a metafictional pastiche of essays, interviews, profiles, poems, maxims, and drawings, depicting the life of one Eduardo Torres, a “man of books”—that is to say, an intellectual, a thinker, a writer. This unifying element would make the book a novel—an already dynamic form—but the truth is that this is another one of Monterroso’s unclassifiable books, and thinking of it as a novel is meaningless. I will concede that, back then and now, the marketing tag “first and only novel” is a pretty good sell. And for those who wonder, as a translator, I can say that Aaron Kerner’s translation is in tune with the author’s many registers.
A satire of the intellectual life, and a self-critical portrait of the author himself, the book is divided into four parts, plus an addendum. Part I, “Tributes,” serves as an introduction to the main character from the eyes of those closest to him.
The first tribute, a text written by his private secretary—penned as a Friend, even though a footnote gives the reader his name—reveals an obscure, revered man, sitting in a dark studio filled with books, and the feeling of a fallen bourgeois. He narrates a visit by the Commission of Notables of San Blas, the fictional town where the main character has spent his entire life. This man is of course Eduardo Torres. The notables are there to ask him to take on the candidacy for the governorship, to fix their small town. But Eduardo declines, “cognizant as he is . . . that the greatest enemy of the powerful, though it may, like all things weak and deceptive, keep itself concealed, is power itself.” Then he gets up and says that his task in life “consists of nothing but the tireless dissemination of ideas, whatever they might be, and wherever they might be found.”
At that point, we might feel that we are about to read a series of profiles written only to extol Torres, to show a larger-than-life intellectual. And in a way, the authors try to do it. But before we feel too dazzled by this man, close to the midpoint in the book, in comes the funniest tribute and my favorite part, written by his wife, Carmen de Torres, who sees the man and his pose, and the question finally hits. Is this man an idiot?
The heading for Part II reads “Selections from the Work of Eduardo Torres.” We read the thinker’s take on the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, an essay on translation, an address to the Continental Congress of Writers, and even a writer’s decalogue made up of twelve rules or commandments. But perhaps the most telling text, at least for me, is his completely naive review of a new edition of Don Quixote, which is then questioned by an academic through a letter to the Revista de la Universidad de México, a prestigious literary journal, where Eduardo’s piece was published. It’s easy to fall prey to his style and eloquence, but we are always reminded that this man might not be an erudite, but an ass.
The next part of the book carries on with the inner workings of Eduardo’s mind, in the shape of aphorisms, maxims, dicta, and apothegms, put together from notebooks, articles, correspondence, and even table talks. Part III is structured as a dictionary filled with what seem to be random words and concepts, ranging from the hilarious to the more insightful. It’s up to the reader to decide which are smart, and which sound obvious.
Part IV is the shortest. But it could also be the key to the game Monterroso is playing with us. Titled “Impromptu Collaborations,” here we read a sonnet written by Eduardo Torres and the subsequent analysis by an ambiguous man, Alirio Gutiérrez, who may or may not be the same author. Don’t be fooled by its length though. The sonnet, “The Burro of San Blas (Or, There’s Always a Bigger Ass),” is a brilliant culmination, a clever self-critique.
Since this is not a posthumous tribute, in the addendum, Eduardo himself (but wasn’t it him all along?) gives us his take on the texts included in this mural dedicated to his life as a thinker. Eduardo or Tito, whoever you want to think wrote the last pages, lands one last punch, or “A Final Point,” to this back-and-forth.
Reading The Rest Is Silence is both a delight and a reality check for the reader who takes books and writers too seriously. In this metaliterary game, questioning if Eduardo Torres is indeed a brilliant, larger-than-life intellectual—even if that is only within the small city of San Blas—or simply an incompetent book-obsessed man, the only winner is, and will always be, the reader.
Efrén Ordóñez Garza is a writer from Monterrey, Mexico, living and running in Washington, DC. He is the author of the novel Humo (NitroPress, 2017), the short story collection Gris infierno (Editorial An.alfa.beta, 2014), and the forthcoming novel Productos desechables (Textofilia, 2025), all written and published in Spanish. He founded the literary translation press Argonáutica (2017-2022) for which he translated Mark Haber’s short story collection Melville’s Beard / Las barbas de Melville. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The City College of New York.
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