Treasure map fragments

“When he woke up, Augusto Monterroso was still there.” A journey to the great readings that forged the master of the minimal.

Marguerite Yourcenar said that one of the best ways to recreate someone’s thoughts is to reconstruct their library. And even more so in the case of a writer. And even more so in the case of Augusto Monterroso, whose work is mainly fueled by literature. Leticia Sánchez Ruiz delves into Monterroso’s personal library that Bárbara Jacobs, his widow, donated to the University of Oviedo, and from that legacy she tries to reconstruct his life and his work as if it were a map of her own life and the treasure she wanted to find.

In an almost detective-like manner, we will discover the press clippings of shipwrecks that he kept inside Moby Dick, the pencil corrections he made to his friend Cortázar’s stories, the loving dedications of García Márquez, Neruda, Rulfo and many others, the notes he wrote by hand in the margins or the paragraphs he underlined, revealing that a library can reveal traits of its owner such as irony, conciseness and lucidity.

There is nothing more personal for a writer than the way he relates to books. And in this way we will get closer to the intimacy of Augusto Monterroso, one of the most renowned short story writers of all time and an author admired by other literary giants such as Roberto Bolaño, Isaac Asimov and Italo Calvino. His brevity, his humour, his calm way of understanding the world and the human condition are already part of universal literature.

But, as the Guatemalan himself said, each thing means at least two things and each text pays an irreverent homage to the history of literature. Therefore, this work speaks of Augusto Monterroso, and also of the problems that plague writers, of the eagerness to read, of the history of books and of how libraries reflect their owners.

Introduction to Treasure Map Fragments, by Leticia Sánchez Ruiz
«Although I regret not having been able to meet Augusto Monterroso in person (and thanks to the dedication I found in one of his books I discovered that one day we were on the verge of colliding), I have the feeling, perhaps illusory, that by getting into his library I have been able to get to know him better than many others who did manage to shake his hand. I hope that this book will help to make people a little better known, if possible, about the man, the writer and the immense reader that Augusto Monterroso was.»