{"id":169175,"date":"2024-11-08T10:05:11","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T15:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169175"},"modified":"2024-11-22T13:16:15","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T18:16:15","slug":"monterroso-gold-seekers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/11\/08\/monterroso-gold-seekers\/","title":{"rendered":"On Augusto Monterroso\u2019s The Gold Seekers<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From Ay\u00e9 Aton\u2019s portfolio Afrika<\/a><\/em> in the new Fall issue of T<\/em>he Paris Review<\/em>. Courtesy of MARCH and the Estate of Ay\u00e9 Aton<\/span>. Photograph by Cary Whittier.<\/p><\/div>\n

Augusto Monterroso\u2019s <\/span>The Gold Seekers<\/span><\/i> is a fun mix of personal archaeology and literary autobiography in an erudite yet concise package. I love a short book full of rabbit holes for me to follow long after I\u2019m finished, I love reading in translation, and I love prose that doesn\u2019t conform to any particular genre. <\/span>The Gold Seekers<\/span><\/i> fits the bill. On the surface, it\u2019s a memoir of the Guatemalan writer\u2019s bohemian childhood through the twenties into the thirties. But the narrative of Monterroso\u2019s early life occasionally strays into his later years or departs entirely from his material existence to ruminate on literature, film, Central American history, obscure Italian poets, and much more. The memoir, with its detours and vignettes, reads like a book of experimental essays, the unifying subject matter being Monterroso\u2019s excavation of the people and events that helped him form an early idea of himself, an idea inherently tied to taste\u2014how he relates to his world through his developing sensibilities and ethics. The sections on Central American history contextualize Monterroso\u2019s later self-theorization as an \u201cignored\u201d writer whose political exile in Mexico from his adopted Guatemala rendered him a \u201ccitizen of nowhere,\u201d seemingly unnoticed by the wider literary establishment despite the fact that he became a favorite of writers like Calvino for his imaginative yet succinct short stories. Monterroso\u2019s memoir is also characteristically slim; the turns of his capacious mind are rendered from Spanish into lyrical English by the translator Jessica Sequeira, and the whole book, including a foreword by Enrique Vila-Matas and a translator\u2019s note by Sequeira, totals under a hundred and fifty pages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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A descendant of Guatemalan and Honduran aristocrats, Monterroso was born in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, into a family that prioritized art even as their material circumstances and political clout declined over the years, requiring them to move around quite a bit. \u201cMy childhood became a mirror-like double in that environment of fantasy, imagination, and unreality in which my parents had surrounded themselves,\u201d he writes early in the book. We are introduced to music teachers (whom he and his brothers do their best to annoy), traveling performers (with whom he sometimes falls in love), august relations (whose manners he occasionally corrects), and films shown in the cinema his father manages. There is plenty of material from his youth for Monterroso to sift through. Questions of curation, of curating one\u2019s very sense of self, prevail throughout the text. One of my favorite chapters begins with the lovely sentence \u201cIt\u2019s possible to choose your most remote ancestors\u201d and goes on to describe Monterroso\u2019s admiration for the forgotten late-Renaissance poet Janus Vitalis, who, through a circuitous correspondence with a retired Spanish librarian, Monterroso discovers may actually be a distant relative. The text is full of such apparent diversions, but collectively they constellate the work\u2019s core\u2014an exploration of how one chooses the self one becomes, even in the face of what one cannot choose (one\u2019s place in time, geography, circumstance). Ultimately, our choices about to whom and what we give our energy, our intellect, and our love are the best shot we have of identifying who we are.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Matt Broaddus is the author of <\/em>Temporal Anomalies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Deeper the Tropics. His poems \u201cThe Answer is Beef<\/a>\u201d and \u201cTopos<\/a>\u201d appear in the new Fall issue of\u00a0 <\/em>The Paris Review, no. 249.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur choices about to whom and what we give our energy, our intellect, and our love are the best shot we have of identifying who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2544,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[24555,67827,68800],"class_list":["post-169175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-about-poetry","tag-featured","tag-issue-249"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Augusto Monterroso\u2019s The Gold Seekers by Matt Broaddus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 8, 2024 \u2013 \u201cOur choices about to whom and what we give our energy, our intellect, and our love are the best shot we have of identifying who we are.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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