"My Manservant and Me" and "The Gold Seekers"

 It is an odd experience to read these two slim books one after another, Hervé Guibert's My Manservant and Me (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) and Augusto Monterroso's The Gold Seekers (translated by Jessica Sequeira). Both books were written towards the end of the lives of the acclaimed authors. Both play with the conventions of a memoir, Guibert by fictionalization, Monterroso by fragmentation. There the similarities end. Whereas Guibert focuses on the decrepitude of age and the ambiguous help that youth can give, Monterroso searches for the origins of things in childhood and the influence of the adults at the beginning. Not just the contents but the ambitions differ too. My Manservant and Me aims to be a small masterpiece, but The Gold Seekers, which covers only the first fifteen years of its author's life, ends intentionally incomplete. Although both books contains surreal elements, yet their approach is very different. Guibert gives a surrealistic twist to life, whereas Monterroso already finds life to be surreal. Could the differences, in terms of ambition, content, and style, be attributed to their authors' movement or lack thereof? In his book, Guibert writes with the confidence of man who has lived all his life in Paris and who has never had to fear exile. In contrast, Monterroso, born in Honduras, moving constantly with his parents between Honduras and Guatemala, and finally exiling himself in Mexico, has an abiding sense of the transient. 

His Mexican friends ask him why he still travels with a Guatemalan passport after living in Mexico for so many years. He has no good answer to their question. It becomes a joke between him and his friends, but it turns into an accusation of treason when the joke reaches the Guatemalan press: that he sold out his nationality "for a plate of lentils." His reflections that follow express a sense of bewilderment with rueful, sly, and good-natured humor:

"Others, more precise, say that one is from the place where their belly button meets its final rest. My belly button is of tremendous importance, obviously. Would it be enough to prove myself Honduran? And what about that passport of mine, where my ears looks so good? "Do you think about your roots a lot?" a female friend, an Argentinian journalist, asks, as if roots were something I'd left somewhere. When I tell her I'm not a telegraph post, she laughs, like someone who gets the joke. The ancients said something that sounds like a sin to us: Ubi bene, ibi patria: Your country is where you are well. Was that equivalent to a plate of lentils? But it's not about foods, roots, or customs. You reach another place, wherever it may be; you meet your new neighbor and attribute to them virtues and defects, that will also be attributed to you. As for myself, wherever I might be, I attribute to others a high degree of superiority, as well as an absolute right, which I lack, to the piece of planet where we happen to be at that moment, owing to the simple circumstances of their arrival—or their parents' arrival—before me, one day or ninety years previous. Yet thinking about it a little, when I look around, or remember, it all comes to the same. If my neighbor happens to be a writer, they will be very similar to the ones elsewhere. When they see their city, they will not only think of the stone, steel, or adobe used to build the houses: they will also think of clouds, conflicts of the soul, vowel sounds, and the combinations of words that produce with greatest effect their feelings or ideas."

I like to think, like Monterosso, I belong to the country of writers. I like strong, handsome, young men as much as does Guibert, like Monterosso, I am at heart a seeker of gold.