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language: Spanish
country: Guatemala
year: 1959
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary, speculative
dates read: 6.12.24-10.12.24
Augusto Monterroso’s Obras completas (y otros cuentos) has been vaguely on my agenda since high school, when I became aware of microfiction, because Monterroso is the author of one of the shortest (though no longer the shortest) story in Spanish, “El dinosaurio”:
Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
[When h/ awoke, the dinosaur was still there.]
also I think our Spanish IV textbook included “El eclipse”, which is a wild choice for an American textbook company to make. power move by the authors.
anyway, after a few false starts in the past where I had the book from the library but never actually got around to reading it, I’ve finally read this collection, which includes “El dinosaurio” and 12 other stories, a mostly mundane but several (like “El dinosaurio”) speculative. I liked it! it didn’t blow me away, but it did make me want to experiment more with extremely short fiction.
a few highlights:
I’m kind of fascinated by the fact that three different stories all deal with mediocre stage performances. “Primera dama” is about the wife of a president who volunteers to recite some poetry for a fundraiser to support school breakfasts. “El concierto” is about an ambiguously-military-dictator who is conscious of the fact that his daughter is a horrible musician and that all of the lackeys who attend her performances are only applauding because they’re scared of what he’ll do to them if they don’t, but who also hates the way this draws attention to his lackeys’ fakeness and resents his daughter putting him in this position. “No quiero engañarlos” is about a minor actress monopolizing the stage at a film premier to go on at length about how she doesn’t merit the praise the MC gave her (which he only did to be polite, since she isn’t even the star of the film). I actually found her speech charming, but I think I was supposed to find it overblown and ridiculous, so the story didn’t quite land for me.
there’s clearly something about the space of the performance that Monterroso was interested in. this is also a factor in “Obras completas” (where the fear of putting genuine creations into the world is partly rooted in a profound discomfort with any response to those creations, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative) and in “Leopoldo (sus trabajos)”, which is about a (notional) writer who’s stuck in a loop doing background research for a story because he’s convinced it needs to be perfect in order to exist at all.
politics also runs throughout the collection: it was published in 1959, 5 years after the US-backed coup d’état that ended the Guatemalan Revolution and led ultimately to a genocide against Guatemala’s Maya population. Monterroso was at this point living in exile in Mexico, where he had previously worked at the Guatemalan embassy during the Arévalo and Árbenz presidencies, and it’s difficult for me not to suspect that some of the stories — like “Primera dama” and “El concierto” are intended as bitter satires of the military junta that overthrew Árbenz in 1954.
another recurring theme is some weirdness about Indigenous people. the opening story, “Mister Taylor”, is about an American merchant in an unnamed South American country who attempts to establish a market for ~shrunken heads~ purchased from Indigenous people in the Amazon and — after a brief flurry of success, as his producers run out of heads — ends up being beheaded himself and sent back to the US as his own product. alongside “El eclipse” this felt a bit…hm…coming from a non-Indigenous writer.
all told, while this was not my favorite book I’ve read this year, it’s got some good stuff and I’m glad I finally got to it.
moods: inspiring, lighthearted