Quim Monzó: Gasoline

Maria Campillo reviews Quim Monzó's Gasoline.

Benzina is the second novel and the fifth book by Quim Monzó, a writer who enjoys the unconditional admiration of many readers, thanks above all to the last two collections of short stories, Uf, va dir ell and Olivetti, Moulinex, Chaffoteaux et Maury (1978, 1980).

In the context of the Benzina, I would like to touch on two questions that seem important: the generic and what we might call the thematic. With regard to the first, it is worth noting that Monzó has come back to the novel marked, to some extent, by the experience of writing short stories during the last few years, and perhaps for this reason the book suffers from a kind of spinning-out of what we thought of (at one time) as the basic idea or single idea in the structuring of a short story. This technique (first adopted in Self-service and developed and rounded out in the last two collections) served to construct the narrative around a situation or gag 'initial, final or concentrically cumulative' that the author now resolves in the sum of situations less easily engaged than inside the structure 'concentrated and almost always rounded' of his short stories. We shall not take him to task for that, especially when we bear in mind that attempting this in a novel, from a far more mature literary position than he occupied when he wrote L'udol del griso al caire de les clavegueres, can only be to his advantage in terms of his acquisition of new forms and his manipulation of language, something I have always regarded as a particularly attractive feature of this writer.

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