A Thousand Morons by Quim Monzó
My rating: 4/5 cats
open letter has given me another book by quim monzo!
which i liked somewhat less than the first one.
i loved the second half of this book, which showcases short-short stories, the longest of which is three-and-a-half pages. the first half has some standouts, to be sure, but some of them just didn’t do anything for me, sad to say. Love is Eternal, Saturday, and Praise were great. they cover such topics as romantic entanglements built on misguided altruistic intentions, the inability to eradicate the stains other people leave on our lives, and the end results of our empty promises. and all three of them are superb. but the opening story, Mr. Beneset, is one of those short stories that i just don’t “get.” not that i don’t understand the words, or the plot; i am not myself one of the thousand morons, it’s just a story that i read, shrugged, and said “why was that story necessary?” which is how i used to feel about most short stories, until i came around, so it is an uncomfortable regression.
but then i get to the second half, and this story, Thirty Lines, and i have to laugh at the way he seemed to know what i was thinking, questioning the usefulness of the short story itself:
The writer begins typing cautiously. He has a short story to write. Recently, people have been talking about the virtues of short fiction, but, if he were to be frank, he would confess that he detests stories in general and short ones in particular. Nonetheless, to keep in the swim, he has been forced to join the band of fakers pretending to be passionate about brevity. Consequently, he is terrified by how lightly his fingers run across the keys, one word flowing after another, and another, and then another, finally shaping into a line behind which another—and another!—are already forming, yet still he can’t focus on a theme, because he is trained for long distances: he sometimes needs a hundred pages before he gets a glimpse of what he is going to write about, and at others not even two hundred suffice. He has never once worried about length. The longer, the better: blessed be each new line, because, one after the other, they reveal the size and splendor of his work, and consequently, even though two or fifty lines add nothing to the story he is telling, at the end of the day, he never axes a single one. Conversely, to write this story he would almost need to take a tape measure and measure it. It is absurd. It’s like asking a marathon runner to run a hundred meters with dignity. In a story, each new line isn’t one more line, but one less, and in this case, specifically, one line less up to thirty, because the rubric is: “between one and thirty lines,” in the voice of the old fellow who called him from a newspaper’s Sunday supplement to ask him for a story. The writer reluctantly lifts his fingers off the keys and counts the lines he has written so far: twenty-three. He has only seven to go to reach thirty. But, after he has registered that insight—plus this one—even less remain: six. Good God! He is incapable of having a thought and not typing it, so each new one eats up a new line and that means by line twenty-six he realizes he is only four lines from the end and he hasn’t succeeded in focusing on the story, perhaps because—and he has suspected this for a long time—he has nothing to say, and although he usually manages to hide the fact by dint of writing pages and yet more pages, this damned short story makes it quite clear, and explains why he sighs when he reaches line twenty-nine and, with a not entirely justified feeling of failure, puts the final full-stop on the thirtieth.
because it manages to simultaneously poke fun at people who think it is easy to write a short story, and at, you know, those overinflated windbags who write huge volumes of inflated postmodernist prose.
IS LIGHTHEARTED RIBBING, FRIENDS!!
so, yeah. i think the shorter pieces on this collection are stronger than the slightly longer ones on the first half, but he is unquestionably a writer i enjoy, and i also do strongly recommend the first collection open letter put out of his, Guadalajara. you know, if you like stories.
also: View Spoiler »
read my book reviews on goodreads
