From Ayé Aton’s portfolio Afrika in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review.
Augusto Monterroso’s The Gold Seekers 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’m finished, I love reading in translation, and I love prose that doesn’t conform to any particular genre. The Gold Seekers fits the bill. On the surface, it’s a memoir of the Guatemalan writer’s bohemian childhood through the twenties into the thirties. But the narrative of Monterroso’s 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’s excavation of the people and events that helped him form an early idea of himself, an idea inherently tied to taste—how he relates to his world through his developing sensibilities and ethics. The sections on Central American history contextualize Monterroso’s later self-theorization as an “ignored” writer whose political exile in Mexico from his adopted Guatemala rendered him a “citizen of nowhere,” 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’s 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’s note by Sequeira, totals under a hundred and fifty pages.
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. “My childhood became a mirror-like double in that environment of fantasy, imagination, and unreality in which my parents had surrounded themselves,” 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’s very sense of self, prevail throughout the text. One of my favorite chapters begins with the lovely sentence “It’s possible to choose your most remote ancestors” and goes on to describe Monterroso’s 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’s core—an exploration of how one chooses the self one becomes, even in the face of what one cannot choose (one’s 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.
Matt Broaddus is the author of Temporal Anomalies and Deeper the Tropics. His poems “The Answer is Beef” and “Topos” appear in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249.
