Complete Works and Other Stories

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Augusto Monterroso is one of the very few Latin American authors whose works are truly tailor-made for a comparative perspective on world literature. Rather than comparing Monterroso to other authors of the Western tradition, as seems to be the case for Latin American authors who are world renowned, one normally ends up perusing that tradition in terms of someone like Monterroso. Within the historical — but not aesthetic — relativity of such an assertion, the truth is that Monterroso is a precursor in many ways, serving as an enhancing presence for what is generally understood by “Latin American” literature. In the lecture series Six Memos for the Next Millennium (trans. Patrick Creagh, 1988), Italo Calvino discusses succinctly the universality and indispensability for literature of Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. Toward the end of the second lecture Calvino states:

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