Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 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,...

Practising my Spanish again. Here are my very basic translations of Monterroso: The Mirror That Could Not Sleep There was once a hand mirror who felt alone. Nobody saw himself in him, and so he felt really bad, as if he did not exist. The feeling was reasonable but the other mirrors made fun of him. At night, the other mirrors were kept in the same drawer of the dressing table. They slept profoundly, far from the concerns of the neurotic. The Black Sheep In a distant country there lived many years ago a black sheep. It was executed by firing squad. A century later, the repentant flock raised an equestrian statue that looked very nice in the park. Just so, ever after, every time black sheep appeared they were rapidly executed, so that the future generations of sheep, common and normal, could also be trained in sculpture. The Imperfect Paradise It’s true—the man said mechanically, without quitting the view of the flames that burned in the chimney that night in winter—in Paradise there a...