Quim Monzó

Quim Monzó (Barcelona, 1952) is not just a writer of fiction but also one of the most popular columnists in Catalonia. His journalistic work has been published in various anthologies. Vuitanta-sis contes (Eighty-Six Stories) has been honoured with extensive critical acclaim and prizes and has been translated into Spanish by the prestigious Spanish novelist, Javier Cercas. His work can be read in over fifteen languages.

Quim Monzó was born in Barcelona in 1952. Among other things, he has been a graphic designer, a comic artist, a war correspondent, a songwriter, a scriptwriter for television and radio, a translator (Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger...), and, above all, an author. Monzó first appeared on the scene in 1976 when he won the Prudenci Bertrana award with the novel L'udol del griso al caire de les clavegueres (The Howl of the Cop on the Edge of the Sewers), which he has never wanted to republish. It was after the publication of his collection of short stories Uf, va dir ell (Oof, He Said) that his work began to combine readability with the solvent potency of literature.

Quim Monzó has made his biggest splash in 'minor' genres such as the short story or journalistic literature. And when he was written novels, he has done so using narrative procedures which are alien to 19th century conventions (psychology of the characters, etc.), a fact which has led certain critics to describe these works arbitrarily as being 'long short stories'. Quim Monzó has been little influenced by the Catalan narrative tradition. Only Pere Calders and Francesc Trabal appear on the list of authors he usually mentions when asked for his literary models. Among the writers who stand out as major influences on his work are Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Cesares, Raymond Queneau... This is quite apart from non-literary influences (video games, the comics of Massimo Mattioli, Tex Avery cartoons).

In various interviews, Monzó has described the process of writing his narrative works as a process of improvisation without a previous plan, which bases its efficiency on the immediate chucking into the wastepaper basket of numerous beginnings and drafts which he has rejected as unworkable and on the methodical and repetitive rewriting from top to bottom of the drafts which work: "I start to write a story without knowing where I'm heading, and let myself go with the flow. That is why fifty per cent of the stories I write go straight into the bin, because they might have brilliant beginnings but they don't work, they don't go anywhere: they're not stories, they are simply narratives. You cannot start a story knowing how it will finish or what will happen, because then you just don't write it." (Eva Piquer: "Quim Monzó the journalist", Revue... 1998).

The dynamic behind Quim Monzó's writing lies in a tension between narrative expansion and a formal crystallisation of materials. Everything which at first seems casual, substantive and fluid, suddenly takes on a geometric form. The process of formalisation of the materials is certainly present in the short stories and to a lesser extent in the novels, where the expansive tendency is dominant. Also in the articles, a measured literary formalisation of the materials emerges.

Monzó's writing traces the paths of the inventions and of the prisons which we ourselves invent for ourselves: the circumvolutions of the circles which entrap us. It doesn't function precisely with biographical data, or generational, sociological, urban or rural data, but rather thanks to the language, the fictions, the illusions and the images shared by the readers. What Quim Monzó writes is not purely fiction, but rather metafiction: fiction about fiction. The mask falls from the face of the prophet, the compulsive liar, the stock hero, the writer and the reader in a demythologising action which is not generated by iconoclastic impulses but in order to strip things bare: to call them by their name. Quim Monzó tells stories and at the same time interrogates them and analyses them. The use of incisive comments in brackets as an ironical mechanism which refracts the voice, and of questions as a mechanism which lays siege to the meaning of events, are a constant factor in the texture of Monzó's prose. Quim Monzó writes metafiction, but not in the culturalist fashion into which those who make abundant use of quotes and rewrites so often fall. As well as interrogating and splitting the voices, he sometimes uses, as raw material for his narratives, previous fictions which are well-known to his readers, in order to invert them, to deform them by perverting their internal logic. The idyllic or at least conventional beginnings, soon turn into personal hells: a visit to the tower of Pisa or a persistent erection cannot avoid the sod's law which rules in the worlds of Monzó. Michèle Gazier has said: "Derrière le pilotage automatiques auquel nous abandonnons nos vies rôdent, selon Monzó, des fantômes, cruels" (Télérama, 16-II-1994). Continue reading...