New Book: Gasoline by Quim Monzo

Quim Monzó remains one of the nicer literary surprises I’ve experienced in the past few years. I was introduced to him when Frank Wilson, who was then editor of the Philly Inquirer’s book review section, assigned his novel The Enormity of the Tragedy to me for review. I had no idea who Monzó was (nor of his publisher, Peter Owen Publisher, another nice discovery), but the novel quickly won me over.

It didn’t take long, as the plot is a lot of fun, violent, sexy, and quietly surreal (all in all, a little like a literary adjunct to Pedro Almodovar). The book is about a middle-aged Catalan man who is suddenly granted enormous sexual powers, but said powers come at their own ironic cost. First of all, the protagonist’s erection never subsides, leading to some social difficulties. Secondly, and far more importantly, a doctor tells him that his erection is a side-effect of a disease that will kill him in 7 weeks. So the protagonist, who isn’t a terribly admirable figure, uses this as license to indulge his appetites as much as possible, since there will effectively be no consequences. (As you might have guessed by now, Monzó, by all reports, is quite the character. You can get an idea in this interview.)

This storyline is juxtaposed with that of the protagonist’s teenage stepdaughter, who is verging on sex for the first time. Father and daughter hate each other and have an incredibly dysfunctional relationship, exacerbated by the fact that they live together in the same house. (This gets so bad that the daughter eventually plots the father’s death.) Monzó plays this scenario for a whole lot of ugliness and awfulness, as well as some laughs (that are ugly in their own way), though all in all the book tends to carry you along on a tide of just-surreal-enough plot and mordant, understated prose. I liked it a lot, and still recommend it.

This is all a way of getting to the fact that when I saw Open Letter would be the first publisher to translate another Monzó book since Enormity, I was fairly excited. It’s called Gasoline, and I read it over the weekend. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as good as my first hit of Monzó was.

It’s not that Gasoline is a bad book, just that with The Enormity of the Tragedy to go by, it feels like a lesser work. Gasoline was published 6 years before Enormity (1989 versus 1983), and in a lot of ways it feels like a precursor volume, as the books cover a lot of the same thematic territory and even have similar protagonists. As with Enormity, Gasoline’s protagonist–named Heribert–is sex-obessed, not terribly likable, and is going through a period of awful alienation. He’s an artist, and though he isn’t beset with a terminal disease, he does have a huge show in a few weeks and exactly zero canvasses to hang in it, plus a huge case of creative block. The book is essentially a countdown to the show, with him running around feeling disaffected, spying on his girlfriend as she cheats on him, sleeping with other women himself, and generally sounding extremely depressed and not getting any painting done.

At its best, the book pulls in some highly enjoyable surreal touches, as in Enormity. For instance, there’s a chase scene in which the Heribert’s girlfriend and the guy she’s cheating with head off in a taxi, and Heribert flags down another one to follow them in. The book is surreal enough to permit this twist, but real enough that Heribert feels ridiculous telling the driver “follow that car” like in a movie. Monzó does a good job of playing with the line throughout. So, for instance, as the chase continues on foot Heribert decides to “disguise” himself by progressively buying more and more flagrant articles of clothing, on the theory that the best disguise is to wear things that no one in their right mind would wear if they were trying to be covert. Thus first he buys a huge blonde wig with curls, then pink sunglasses with heart-shaped lenses, then a giant red-and-white beach ball, and so on. But, of course, all of the bystanders watching him are laughing their asses off–it’s this kind of back-and-forth playing with surrealism in his books that Monzó excels at.

This kind of thing is fun in the way that I recall Enormity being fun, but there are also stretches that just aren’t as compelling. Enormity, with its alternating plotline where each half played off the other, the difficult relationship with father and daughter, and the countdown to the protagonist’s death, had a real tightness and narrative tension to it that always felt substantial and meaningful. Despite being a much shorter book, Gasoline has a lot more that feels unnecessary, and many of the rhetorical/philosophical turns don’t feel as fresh. For instance, early in the book Heribert is in a bookshop and he thinks:

The really childish thing is to refuse to admit that it is good for things to be classified; despite the imperfections of the labels, this is the only way to delimit them, understand them, control them, grasp them. . . . He feels that the most logical thing in the world is precisely for them to be classified. If not, what chaos.

This is a servicable bit of prose that gets at how Heribert is feeling his world slowly come apart, but it doesn’t achieve much purpose beyond that, and nor does this idea get elaborated in a more meaningful way.

All in all, Gasoline shows a lot of promise, and clearly Monzó did go on to do better things, but at this point with Enormity out there in translation it feels a little belated. Open Letter will be publishing Monzó’s 1996 novel, Guadalajara, later this year, and I’ll probably give that one a shot on the basis of the trajectory indicated by these two. (Although, I must say that based on the title and Monzó’s proclivity for mordant, acerbic humor, his 2007 novel, Mil cretins, sounds like a lot of fun.)

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