Kim Munzo: “Gasoline” – a hollow game

With the onset of the new year, an established artist descends. This is the basic tension with which Kim Monzo begins his novel “Gasoline”. Painter Heribert wakes up next to his sweetheart in New York on New Year’s Day and finds himself losing control of his life, his relationships, and his work.

His thoughts are erratic, his creativity ebbed and his vision becomes arbitrary: “He looks at the legs of book tables in hopes of spotting woodworms. There aren’t any. He returns to the book, turns the page, sees whistle drawing with caption.” Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Surely, he thinks, he feels some happiness.

Kim Monzo, born in 1952, is a well-known and well-known farewell composer in his Catalan homeland. In 2007 he gave the opening speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair when Catalan literature was the main theme. Monzo’s work has been preserved by the Frankfurt publishing house for decades – and Monika Lubke recently translated this early work of the author into German.

Gasoline is a light-hearted script by a writer who seems to fear nothing more than slowness and boredom. From this she derives the associative energy that gives the novel its stylistic velocity: “Why doesn’t it stay here forever, here, where everything is white and everyone wears white, as if there were a rule, and so on with metaphors and playing aphorisms like a juggler?”

Herbert just lives there. dreams of paintings of his role model Edward Hopper; After visiting a bookstore, he tracks down a woman he notices in a mix of dude and stalker; He discovers that his wife, who looks after him as a gallery owner, is having an affair with a man named Humbert, who will become the main character in the second part of the novel.

Despite all this, Monzo does not allow his characters lingering pangs of conscience, motives, or considerations. Any psychological realism is thrown to the wind. Instead, the writer places himself in the tradition of the mechanism of meaninglessness and surrealism in Dada, which is less about coherence and logic and more about the atmospheric and unfiltered presentation of one’s own perception.

The style may seem historical to some. But Monzo manages to show a linguistic freshness in his text that makes this book still worth reading today. In regard to its staff and prestige as well, Benzene has not lost any of its themes: “Even if he has been repeatedly accused of such various means as lack of concept and a sign of lack of style, Humbert has defended himself by saying, That only one lack of style is his style!”

Also in 2023, the art world will explode with such vanity and will allow its gallery owners and painter geniuses to parade up and down as if it were a never-ending dance. It was this hollow game that Kim Monzo sarcastically picked up several years ago.