"There are three words that refer to nothing: God, happiness, and love. Love is being horny... with a tie on."
- Quim Monzó, in an interview for the PEN World Voices Festival, 2010
Quim Monzó is a Catalan writer and reporter, a storyteller, and an undisputed master of the short form. Such is his literary repute - so intensely has his work been scrutinised - that I feel a bit out of my depth even registering my appreciation, since there is every possibility that I don't properly understand it.
Monzó's collections of short stories have gained worldwide renown for the deadly irony that laces their quirky, often amusing and misleadingly simple exterior; beneath every tale lies a 'hidden' story, and what is truly remarkable about these works may be the subtlety with which Monzó suggests it is there, has been there all along. All we know is that, as Robert Coover (2010) notes,
"...for all the wit and comedy, there is something profoundly melancholic about his stories, as if being funny, in such a universe, were a way of being brave."
What makes the stories sad is left for us to decide; perhaps for this reason they become less of a comment on the state of humanity, more on the disposition of the individual reader.
A common theme in Monzó's work seems to be that of inconsistency; everything is in a perpetual state of flux, and in the end nothing and no one can be trusted. In his reworking of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor, a young beetle wakes up to find himself transformed into a human child. Initially appalled at his condition, he wanders around his new home, first astonished by what he sees and then accepting as his mind too undergoes a swift and alarming transformation. The story ends abruptly with Gregor squashing his old family, not out of sadism but indifference, which is of course no less terrifying.
The fickleness of things and people in Monzó's world may be a metaphor for a number of aspects of real life, often hinted at in the stories themselves; perhaps the ever-changing state of politics (not least in Catalonia), perhaps the flimsy and inconsistent values of a consumer society, perhaps women, who seem capable of fooling even themselves in their quest for prescribed 'happiness'. It should also be noted that Monzó suffers from Tourette's syndrome and has a nervous tic that causes him to frequently screw up his face, a compulsion he has frequently joked about as his own face appears to be untrustworthy/have a dual personality!
Below is my own translation (from Spanish) of one of the short stories from his 1993 collection, The Why of Things.
Mid afternoon, and the man sits at his desk, takes a sheet of blank paper, puts it in the machine and begins to write. The first phrase comes in a moment. The second one too. Between the second and third, there are a few seconds of doubt.
He fills a page, draws the sheet from the guts of the machine and leaves it to one side, with the blank side facing upwards. To this first sheet he adds another, and then another. From time to time he reviews what he has written, crosses out words, changes the order of others within sentences, removes paragraphs, throws entire pages into the wastepaper bin. Suddenly he moves the machine, grabs the pile of written pages, shifts it to the right and with a pen scribbles out, alters, adds, deletes. He places the pile of corrected papers on the right, moves back over to the machine and re-writes the story from start to finish. Once he has finished, he corrects it again by hand, and rewrites it again by machine.
Late into the night, he re-reads it for the umpteenth time. It is a story. He likes it a lot. So much that he cries for joy. He is happy. It may be the best story he has ever written. It seems to him almost perfect. Almost, but it lacks a title. When he finds an adequate title it will be unsurpassable. He thinks about what title to give it. One comes to him. He writes it on a page, to see how it feels. It isn't quite working. In fact, it doesn't work at all. He crosses it out. He thinks of another. He crosses that out too.
All the titles that occur to him destroy the story: or they're obvious, or drag the story down in a surrealism that ruins its simplicity. Or else they are such nonsenses that they blow it completely. For a moment he considers calling it Untitled, but this spoils it even more. He also considers really not giving it a title, and leaving the space for it empty. But this solution is the worst of all: perhaps there does exist a story that doesn't need a title, but it's not this one; this needs a very precise one: the title that turns this almost-perfect story into a completely perfect story: the best he has even written.
At dawn he gives up: there is no title sufficiently perfect for a story so perfect that no title is good enough for it, making it impossible to be perfect at all. Resigned (and knowing that he cannot do anything else), he takes the pages where he has written the story, tears them in half and tears each of these halves in half; and so on, until they are in pieces.
Finally, below is my favourite quote from this fantastic writer, and one I believe may be applied to a number of areas of life (perhaps I've been reading too much and am applying double meanings to everything, though this may not necessarily be a bad thing):
"You cannot start a story knowing how it will finish or what will happen, because then you just don't write it"
- Quim Monzó, 1998
