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Quim Monzó
Review of El Millor Dels Mons1cdef.jpg?1144792800 "</i>")
El Millor Dels Mons, Quim Monzó
Quaderns Crema, Barcelona, (2001).
The best-known name in contemporary Catalan fiction, regarded by his Spanish publisher - and perhaps not by him alone - as one of the great European writers of our day, Quim Monzó has not lost any of his nasty streak; on the contrary, it seems to get more pronounced with time. Since the splendid El perquè de tot plegat, the author's penchant for black humour - in the vein of Saki, Ambrose Bierce or Roald Dahl at his most corrosive - has steadily intensified, along with his economy of expression, as the publication of the revised Vuitanta-sis contes serves to demonstrate.
In El millor dels mons we find Monzó at his most sarcastic, at his hardest, even, as he implacably dissects human sentiments and human weaknesses. The book is structured in three parts, the first and third consisting of seven and six narratives, respectively, while the central section is a novella that ranks among this writer's funniest and most unsettling work to date, set in a world that borders on those of Kafka, Cortázar and Gonzalo Suárez.
If the first part includes two of the cruellest stories in the book El meu germà and Vacances d'estiu, which nevertheless transmit a considerable sadness it also contains two truly outstanding examples of narrative subtlety: Tot rentant plats, an intriguing experiment along the lines of Robert Coover, and Dos rams de roses which conceals beneath its seeming optimism a devastatingly bleak vision of everyday life. In fact, this latter is one of the stories that most fully embodies the meaning of the title, in allusion to the grotesque figure of Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide, according to whom we live, despite all our misfortunes, in the best of all possible worlds.
Davant del rei de Suècia, the novella that constitutes the second part of the book (a mere hundred pages), on one level relates the trials and tribulations of a Catalan writer who eternally aspires to the Nobel Prize, but beyond the satirical immediacy of certain details that have led many people to think of Pere Gimferrer (although other details run counter to the idea of any obvious caricature) the narrative moves almost imperceptibly from a comedy of manners to a fantastical oneiric universe, by means of a very subtle interplay, not revealed until the very end, between the first-person and third-person voice.
Without a doubt this is one the best stories Monzó has written. Finally, although it is as impeccably handled as the rest of the book, the third part is perhaps the one that offers fewest surprises, in spite of the uncompromising ending with the violence and the merciless portrait of society in L'accident. El millor dels mons is, in short, an uncompromising work of ferocious humour, marking the return of the most sarcastic Monzó, with a power by no means in over-supply among our writers.
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