STOLEN STORIES

The ten stories that make up “Títulos robados” are, no doubt, sad stories, like Monterroso often says the good stories are. In them, ten first-person narrators show us their strangeness before the world, their profound ignorance of human nature, their despair or resignation. They steal titles for their stories from other books or other stories and show us a moment of their lives in which their desires for change succumb to feelings of failure. The end, often premature, of a struggle, the assumption of its uselessness.

An old man who does not want to return to a home town frozen in time in “Tale of Two Cities”; a man who discovers, because of an unfortunate sequence of random events, that the woman who he lives with is a stranger in “Broken Mirror”; the son traveling to Paris to discover that his father has ceased to be a match for him in “Paris never ends”; the teenager who must take care of his alcoholic grandfather as if he was the old pirate at the Admiral Benbow Inn on “The Island Treasure”.

A gallery of lonely people trapped in situations that they can only be resigned to accept, but do not understand anything.