During his speech opening the Frankfurt book fair dedicated to Catalan culture, Quim Monzó, the Catalonian novelist, short-story writer, scriptwriter and journalist said:
In truth, if the speech is part of a ritual and, as in all rituals, what really matters is the form, the protocol, the suit jacket, the tie (or the absence of a tie), does what is said, exactly, matter that much at all? In a religious ceremony celebrated in a dead
language (a mass in Latin, for example), does it matter all that much if some portion of the faithful doesn’t understand the text? Even more to the point: must anything concrete be said at all?
That question posed – playfully, in a speech that mixed erudition with passing references to Claudia Schiffer and Boris Becker -is a good starting point to this wonderful writer whose work is consistently subversive and questioning. An example, his novel The Enormity of the Tragedy which opens with a balding middle-aged widower who after a night’s impotence wakes to find himself blessed/cursed with an enormous and permanent erection; it’s a novel that in the hands of a lesser writer would be puerile and sniggering, but instead it moves from the bawdy to the tragic.
Born in Barcelona in 1952 Quim Monzó worked in the 1970s as a journalist, reporting from Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and East Africa for the Barcelona newspaper Tele/eXpres. He has written extensively and regularly for the paper La Vanguardia.
He has published novels, short stories and prose – often in Catalan. He has also translated a number of authors including Truman Capote, Salinger, Hemingway and Arthur Miller.
As if this wasn’t enough, he has also worked in the world of film, having co-written the screenplay to Bigas Luna‘s breakthrough film Jamon Jamon
A great introduction is the short story collection Guadalajara
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