Bailey Trela at The Baffler:
Monterroso has often been compared to Borges, and the comparisons are generally pretty apt. Both writers preoccupied themselves, formally, with short stories and essays that seem to merge into one another; both had a playful interest in scholarly arcana; both were obsessed with the question of style; and both were fascinated by parables and fables. But compared with the ironclad intertextuality of a writer like Borges, Monterroso’s own brand of self-referentiality isn’t exactly philosophically sound—a result, probably, of his antic disposition. It doesn’t approach, or even attempt to approach, the ideal of a closed system. Read a Borges story, and you often get a sense of the author going solemnly about his work like a monk. In a Monterroso story, the image called to mind is rather that of a clerk—one who is lazy, or bad at his job, or poorly trained, or some combination of the three. Things seem simply to have been misfiled.
The Rest Is Silence, for instance, contains a chapter that’s a review, by Torres, of Monterroso’s collection The Black Sheep and Other Fables. And in Monterroso’s collection Perpetual Motion there are already hints of Torres; several epigraphs are attributed to him, while in one story a character, in an attempt to amuse himself, “writes three pages of false exegesis of one of Góngora’s octaves.”
more here.
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