Movimiento perpetuo: Augusto Monterroso’s Miniatures of Literature, Irony and Flies
Movimiento perpetuo ("Perpetual Motion", 1972) is a collection full of at least three things: literature, irony and flies. Augusto Monterroso, the Guatemalan writer famous for what is often called the shortest story ever written, was a master of brevity, and this book shows him at his most playful.
Author: Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003)
Title: Movimiento perpetuo (1972)
Format: Spanish edition (Alianza Editorial, El libro de bolsillo), 160 pages
Scope: Short prose pieces, essays and micro-stories
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/8413626625 (ASIN 8413626625)
Literature
The literature takes the form of short pieces drawn from the author’s everyday life and anecdotes of all kinds. In these micro-stories Monterroso uses irony and humour to look at the culture of his time; his work is defined by its brevity.
Flies
The flies are at the heart of the book, in the form of quotations about flies from great writers of every age. Volatile and elusive, yet insistent, drawn throughout the pages and discussed in different texts, the flies are the real protagonists of the work, offered as a literary object with many symbolic meanings.
The Dinosaur
Monterroso’s fame rests partly on a single sentence, "El dinosaurio": "Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí" ("When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there"). Published in his first book, Obras completas (y otros cuentos) (1959), it has been endlessly anthologised, analysed and parodied, and Italo Calvino cited it in his lectures on literature as a model of quickness. Monterroso enjoyed the attention and the irony of being known for seven words, and Movimiento perpetuo plays with that reputation.
A Life in Exile
Monterroso was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1921, to a Guatemalan father, and grew up largely in Guatemala, mostly self-taught. His opposition to the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico led to exile, and from the 1950s he lived in Mexico, where he worked at the National Autonomous University and became a central figure of the literary world. His other books include La oveja negra y demás fábulas (1969), satirical fables for adults, and Lo demás es silencio (1978), a mock biography. In 2000 he received the Príncipe de Asturias Prize for Literature.
Why Flies?
The book’s flies are a running joke and a serious meditation. In the opening piece Monterroso proposes that literature has only three great themes: love, death and flies. Flies are everywhere, persistent, trivial and impossible to get rid of, like the small irritations and obsessions that fill a writer’s life. Gathering quotations about them from writers of every period, he turns an insignificant insect into a mirror of literature itself, and of the vanity of those who write.
Brevity as an Art
Monterroso belongs to a Latin American tradition of short, precise and ironic prose that runs from Borges and Juan José Arreola to the microfiction writers of today. Every sentence is polished, and the humour is so dry that it is easy to miss. The pieces reward slow reading, and many of them are only a page long.
Where to Start
Readers new to Monterroso could begin with La oveja negra y demás fábulas, the most immediately accessible of his books, and then come to Movimiento perpetuo for a more personal and digressive side of him. Both are short, and both are best read slowly, a few pieces at a time, with time to smile at the jokes hidden in the footnotes and the epigraphs.
Who Is It For?
It is a book to dip into, a few pages at a time, and to reread. Readers who enjoy Borges or Cortázar will feel at home. I have not found an English translation of this book, so I link the Spanish edition.
As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases.
Part of the reading recommendations featured on books.sapiensverbum.com.
