booklit

If aliens were to read Eduardo Mendoza’s No Word From Gurb (1990) they may well determine that it suffers from ’structural simplicity’. While this is true, it makes it no different from most other things on Earth they are likely to discover, like family apartments and Ford Fiestas.

The novel, initially published in installments in the popular Spanish newspaper, El País, is told in the style of a diary and parodies the city of Barcelona in the build up to the 1992 Olympics. Each day sees a number of entries, usually little more than paragraph with a time of the day attached, as one of the two aliens in the novel writes down his observations about human life while searching for his companion, the eponymous Gurb.

Gurb, having been given the task of making contact with humans, has vanished. It’s probably something to do with how he looks:

Given that we are travelling in non-corporeal form (pure intelligence-analytical factor 4800) decide he should take on bodily appearance similar to that of local inhabitants. Reason: so as not to attract the attention of the autochthonous fauna (real and potential). Consult the Astral Earth Catalogue of Assimilable Forms (AECAF) and choose to give Gurb the appearance of human being known as Madonna.

While not attracting attention is the name of the game for these aliens, the narrator can’t help but attract it as he settles into the task of finding Gurb. He regularly takes human form to blend in although the forms he chooses (Gary Cooper, the Duke of Olivares, and His Holiness Pope Pius XII, amongst others) are never as inconspicuous as he thinks. His ignorance of human customs also draws strange looks, like when a woman, mistaking him for a down-and-out, gives him some spare change and he, out of politeness, swallows it. Or, when ordering in a restaurant: “The gentleman asks what I will have to drink. Not wishing to attract attention, I order the most common human liquid: urine.”

There’s a great deal of humour to be had with the idea of aliens trying to understand human culture and Mendoza plays it for laughs throughout, like when the narrator reads a mystery novel by a famous English lady:

The plot of her novel is very simple. An individual who, to simplify, we will call A, is found dead in the library. Another individual, B, tries to discover who killed A and why. Following a series of illogical undertakings (all that was needed was the formula 3(x2-r)n-+0 and the case would have been solved from the start), B states (wrongly) that the murderer is C. Everyone seems happy with this conclusion, including C. No idea what a butler is.

Repetition is another key to Mendoza’s humour, showcased a number of times when the narrator performs the same activity over and over, with small variations, like when he decides to scour the city looking for Gurb:

15.00 Decide to make a systematic search of the city instead of remaining in one spot. […] Set off following the ideal heliographic plan I built into my internal circuits on leaving the ship. Fall into a trench dug by the Catalan Gas Company.

15.02 Fall into a trench dug by the Catalan Hydroelectric Company.

15.03 Fall into a trench dug by the Barcelona Water Company.

15.04 Fall into a trench dug by the Calle Corcega Neighbourhood Association.

15.06 Decide to abandon the ideal heliographic plan and to walk watching where I put my feet.

While it may seem parochial, poking fun at the state of Barcelona as it (lazily) worked toward the Olympics, there’s an element of truth that can transcend any city, be it criticisms of traffic control, social problems like drugs, the constant cycle of repairs that seem to keep museums closed, or the anti-social mores of councils:

Woken by a thunderous crash. Millions (or more) years ago, the Earth was created out of a series of terrible cataclysms: the roaring oceans covered the coastline and buried whole islands, whilst gigantic mountain ranges collapsed and erupting volcanoes threw up new ones; eaethquakes shifted entire continents. To commemorate these events, every night City Hall sends machines, called refuse trucks, to reproduce that planetary chaos under its inhabitants’ windows.

The steady stream of misunderstandings as the alien goes about finding Gurb, making connections with humans, and even considering romance is nicely balanced against the impressions of humanity from an external point of view as he discovers concepts that don’t exist on his own world, such as class:

Amongst other categories, human beings are apparently divided into rich and poor. This is a division to which they attach huge importance, without knowing why. The fundamental difference between rich and poor seems to be this: the rich, wherever they go, do not pay, even though they acquire and consume as much as they like. The poor, on the other hand, pay through the nose.

Although the daily narrative takes us on a whistlestop tour of Barcelona, the biggest problem Mendoza has is coming to the end of the line. It’s inevitable that Gurb is found, although the way that comes to pass is a tad clumsy and fortuitous. Perhaps the formula 3(x2-r)n-+0 doesn’t work for some books, but the fun to be had with No Word From Gurb is not so much in its conclusion as it is its journey.

There’s probably a lot of jokes than can be made about an author named Quim translated by someone called Bush and, with that in mind, I’ll try and give them a wide berth. So, by way of introduction, the Catalan writer Quim Monzó’s first novel appeared in 1976 and since then has made a name for himself for his novels and short stories but is rather unknown in the English speaking world. Recently published, The Enormity Of The Tragedy (1989) is the first time, as far as I can tell, one of his novels has seen its way from Catalan to English. With this in mind I was curious as to how it would stand up.

Quite well, it turned out, but not quite so well as the penis of main character, Ramon-Maria. When he wakes one morning after a night of failed passion, the damn thing just won’t go down. While it makes him more attractive to women, Ramon-Maria’s predicament is anything but the dirty joke it first seems. His problem is rare, incurable, and leaves him only weeks to live.

Ramon-Maria, at first, does what most learning of such news would do and treats the diagnosis with disbelief:

Seven weeks. He felt an emptiness in the pit of his stomach, an emptiness he preferred to think was caused by shock not by distress or fear. He couldn’t altogether believe it was true. It couldn’t be, he thought, now he wsn’t facing the doctor. Because he’d not opened his mouth in front of the doctor. Seven weeks. It seemed impossible. Surely if he did it all again, if he retraced his steps as if he’d never been to the doctor’s, things would be different. He’d do that. He’d walk to the corner of the street, turn around and come back to the building, press the button to the eighth floor, go back to the surgery, ask for Dr Puig-Amer again, be given the inconsequential results of his tests, the doctor would say that one of these days his permanent erection would disappear, everything would go back to normal and he’d once again be a mortal, without an expiry date.

But, after a second opinion, he’s resigned to his fate and sets out to make his last days the best of his life. He takes out a mortgage and, rather than buying a house, uses the money to sample the best of everything.

Running parallel to the story of Ramon-Maria, is that of his house-mate and step-daughter, Anna-Francesca. She’s young, discovering her sexuality, and hates Ramon-Maria. Innocent of his problems, when she’s not stealing cash from his wallet, she’s entertaining the thought of killing him:

What hypocrites people are who claim man is by nature a peaceful animal! Man is an animal who needs violence as much as any other animal and puts the brake on only (sometimes) because he’s been educated. How many years more would she have to suffer him if she didn’t kill him? Twenty - ten at least? Or even thirty? She couldn’t waste years and years (hey, the prime of life!) waiting for the ten, twenty or thirty years until he died. If he died (say) in twenty years’ time she’d be thirty-five! She’d be a clapped-out old woman. She must act now.

Either way, as the title implies, you know both novel and Ramon-Maria’s life are not going to end well, but the meandering prose sweeps you along wondering who will win out: his terminal illness or Anna-Francesca. The novel’s content is strange in that the important incidents are given short shrift while the banal musings of the characters comes to the fore. Events are sometimes implausible but given the bizarre nature of the novel, they are easily accepted and while the novel, on the back cover, is billed as a “masterpiece of postmodern literary parody” the only postmodernism I sensed was the slight feeling that whatever they did with their lives, Monzó was still the puppet master:

Anna-Francesca woke up screaming…she couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming about…she didn’t like being at the mercy of something over which she had so little control.

For all its comic invention and ponderings of humanity, I was never immersed in The Enormity Of The Tragedy and found myself dipping in and out rather than avidly devouring it. Perhaps that was Monzó’s intention, as I felt like one of the characters within, never able to truly connect - them with each other, me with the book. Sex is the nearest they ever come (I didn’t even get that far with the book!) and, as time draws near for Ramon-Maria, he comes to realise that a life with so much material pleasure is still one wasted.

No doubt the novel is funnier in its original Catalan and I can’t help feel that the translation is, while mostly enjoyable, somewhat lacking. I never really felt the humour (but that may just be my sense of fun versus Monzó’s) and there were typographical errors that popped up from time to time. Monzó’s narrative sidetracks can be amusing although one - where Anna-Francesca learns all the ways to kill someone - felt far too long. And I was sometimes confused because every characters has a double-barrelled name, many of them being Maria-This or That-Maria.

Being limited to The Enormity of Tragedy as a way to introduce myself to Quim Monzó, I suppose the novel is as good a way as any. It’s entertaining and its idiosyncrasies are, for the most part, charming. Insignificant events segue into rambling tangents and astute observations on people and their relationships, despite its own characters being a cast of grotesques. But as a parody - of what? - I’m less convinced and, as I see it, for what is an otherwise enjoyable novel the biggest tragedy is that of the comedy.