Augusto Monterroso - Complete Works and Other Stories

I frequently hear brevity praised, and I feel a provisional happiness when I hear it said that brevity is the soul of wit.

In Satire 1, I, however, Horace asks himself, or pretends to ask Mecenas, why no one is happy with his condition, why the merchant envies the soldier and the soldier the merchant. You remember, don’t you?

The truth is that the writer of short pieces wants nothing more in this world than to write long texts, interminably long texts in which the imagination does not have to work, in which facts, things, animals, and men meet, seek each other out, exist, live together, love, or shed their blood freely without being subjected to the semicolon or the period.

That period, which at this very moment has been imposed upon me by something stronger than myself, something I both respect and despise.

Somewhere on page 45 a comma is missing, omitted consciously or unconsciously by the typesetter who failed to include it on that day, at that time, on that machine; any imbalance this error may cause in the world is his responsibility.

Except for the table of contents, which for unknown reasons comes last in Spanish, the book ends on this page, number 152, which does not mean it could not also begin again here in a backward motion as useless and irrational as the one undertaken by the reader to reach this point.