The Library of Augusto Monterroso

Posted bydantelianocuenta9 July, 2025

Posted inArticles Tags:Dante Liano, Monterroso

Entering a writer's library is like rummaging through the toolbox of a carpenter, a blacksmith, or a sculptor. Screwdrivers, hammers, saws, garlopa, chisel, drill, sandpaper, square and tape measure to work wood (oak, pine, walnut) with nails, screws, glue, varnish and lacquer, that concentrated universe where all the possibilities of manufacture and artefact reside. Only that in the extended world of bookcases, leaning against the wall as if they were going to fall, or as if they were going to tear down that wall, those other tools of the trade are lined up, nails and paper screws enclosed between the cardboard or leather spines. It would be an unbearable banality to say: "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are", because you read everything, regardless of interests and hobbies, obsessions and manias, obligations and duties. Despite everything, going through the books a writer has collected throughout their life can provide clues or coincidences, perhaps clarifications that help better enjoy their books.

Unless he is a travelling writer, one of those that Dr. Arévalo portrayed in his time: "Each country, a library." All this comes to mind by reading Fragments of the Treasure Map, a beautiful title for a very special book. It was written by Leticia Sánchez Ruiz, a writer from Oviedo, after touring the library that Augusto Monterroso donated to the University of Oviedo. We are before a journey full of devotion and reverence, or, as the epigraph best recites: "with love, admiration and deep gratitude". A curiosity: the author never met this admired author in person. He was about to meet him, he confesses, at the presentation of a volume in Salamanca. Only that he arrived late, when the event was over: it was the occasion when he was closest to Monterroso. In a way, the book is a way of establishing an implied, tacit, virtual relationship.

It all likely began with the awarding of the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature to Augusto Monterroso in the year 2000. That award was the most important one received by the Guatemalan author. His stay in Oviedo will have been very pleasant, and Monterroso will have been very well impressed. When he died in 2003, he left a legacy of volumes and manuscripts of great value. His wife, the writer Bárbara Jacobs, decided, in 2008, to donate most of these books to the University of Oviedo. These works travelled from the Chimalistac neighbourhood in Mexico City to Madrid by air. From Madrid, several trucks loaded the five tons of the legacy, and they were deposited in the Library of the El Milán Campus. There, in a vast wing of the enclosure, various shelves treasure years and years of shopping, reading, searching, entertainment, reflection, everything that an author's library implies.

Leticia Sánchez Ruiz leads us through a singular reading, the reading of several readings, especially those that Monterroso made, and only the title of a work would serve to make inferences. There are also annotated books that indicate Monterroso's preferences, and there are manuscripts, letters, and photographs. Not for nothing, Sánchez Ruiz calls his adventure "fragments of the treasure map", a quote that implies an evaluation. At the beginning, he relates that, once, that treasure ran the risk of dissolving into nothingness, as Tito relates in the story How I managed to get rid of five hundred books. That narrative contains a kind of joke, because the author says that one day, he decided to dismantle his collection of books. However, shortly after starting, he regretted it. The anecdote is invented, but it serves to exercise the sarcasm of the Guatemalan author. As far as is known, he never got rid of any book, but rather accumulated copies throughout his life.

Fragments tiptoe through the orderly shelves, which, despite this concert, form a labyrinth of symbols and signs, ready to be interpreted. The path between the volumes serves the author to weave a portrait of Tito Monterroso, which mixes biography, literary anecdotes and textual quotations, and tries to make that painting as faithful as possible to the original. One of the most interesting parts is found in the notes that Titus wrote on the pages of his favourite readings. It begins with a quote from Steiner: There are two types of people, those who read with a pencil in their hand and those who do not. "There's nothing quite as fascinating as the marginal notes of great writers," he says. Tito Monterroso was reading with a pencil in his hand. His stroke is shy, not very emphatic. Sánchez points out that the characteristic of Tito's annotations is that, rather than commenting, he corrects. Who knows if that is the result of his first job in Mexico, proofreader at the Séneca publishing house. In any case, create a personal code: an X for translation errors; a question mark, like a raised eyebrow, in the face of the wrong or the incomprehensible; a bracket for what pleases him; a six-pointed star for the exceptional, and for phrases that mention flies, one of the Guatemalan author's strange obsessions.

Monterroso points out, in Henry  James's Notebook, the paragraphs in which the American complains about the excessive social life, which leaves him no time for writing, as it reflects, says Sánchez, something that Tito himself reflected on in the text Agenda de un escritor. In another book, Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes, Monterroso underlines the statement: "Flaubert did not have a very exact idea of what Emma Bovary's eyes were like." This leads him to seek, in the text, the verification of such an observation, and underlines the parts in which the protagonist's eyes appear: "her black eyes seemed blacker"; "black in the shadow and from a dark blue to full light"; "although they were brown, they looked black." This ambiguity would seem strange in an author who spent a week in search of the mot juste, but the doubt dissolves when one thinks that indeterminacy is one of the keys to literature. Monterroso also underlines the books of Borges and Cortázar, and one might think that the underlines, then, are exclamation marks, in the best sense of the term.

Leticia Sánchez Ruiz points out, as an almost metaliterary curiosity, that in Tito's library are the works of Arturo Monterroso and Porfirio Barba Jacob. He declares, with a certain astonishment, that Arturo Monterroso exists and that he is a Guatemalan writer. I can confirm that intuition: Arturo not only exists in reality, but he is an excellent writer, greatly admired by the countless students of his captivating literary workshops. His works are nothing like Tito's, and that is very good, because it removes suspicions and exploitation of literary coincidences. De Barba Jacob indicates the almost coincidence with the name of Bárbara Jacobs, Monterroso's wife. He completes the information by saying that Titus knew Barba Jacob, because he frequented his parents' house, and that Titus admired him very much. There is much more. Porfirio Barba Jacob was a Colombian modernist who settled in Guatemala, was schooled there, was a friend and enemy of Rafael Arévalo Martínez, and deserved a biography written by Fernando Vallejo. Titus was right when he kept his books. Fragments of a Treasure Map contains much more information, and reading it reveals to us the world of Monterrosian and incites us to what would be the main activity: reading Tito's work, or, what is almost the same, rereading it, because it is prose to be enjoyed over and over again.