Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes
The Monkey Who Wanted To Be a Satirical Writer or, alternately translated as How to Stop Being a Monkey,
is a delightful, incisive short-short story by Latin American literary
master Augusto Monterroso. Ouch! Warning: this is a tale with bite.
It
is now 2021, many years removed from the great literary movement that
came to be known as the Latin American Boom (four of the many Boom
generation authors pictured above) . And with all the outstanding works
of literature from contemporary Latin American authors such as
Isabel Allende, Cristina García, Valeria Luiselli, Juan Gabriel Vásquez,
Rodrigo Fresán, Álvaro Enrigue and Ramon Díaz Eterovic is there any
doubt World Literature has reached stupendous heights thanks to the
contribution of writers from such countries as Mexico, Cuba, Columbia,
Chile, Brazil and Argentina?
In any way to deny this is the case
would be the worst type of nationalism, racism, elitism and twisted
xenophobia. Yet there are certainly individuals who maintain notions
that peoples from Latin America are somehow culturally inferior. Such
idiocy Augusto address in his acid story -
HOW TO STOP BEING A MONKEY
The
spirit of inquiry knows no limits. In the United States and in Europe
they have recently discovered a species of Latin American monkey capable
of expressing itself in writing, identical, perhaps, to that diligent
monkey who, by hitting the keys of a typewriter at random, eventually
reproduces the sonnets of Shakespeare. Something like this naturally
fills these good people with wonder, and there is no lack of willing
translators of our books or ladies and gentlemen of leisure willing to
buy them, as they once bought the shrunken heads of Jivaro Indians. More
than four centuries ago Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas finally succeeded in
convincing the Europeans that we were humans endowed with souls because
we laughed; now they want to convince themselves of the same thing
because we write.
*Note to readers of English: This story appears in Augusto Monterroso's Complete Works and Other Stories published by University of Texas Press under the alternate title: How to Stop Being a Money.
Latin American author Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003)
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