Enormity of the Tragedy

Description

Quim Monzo is the foremost Catalan writer of his generation and has been translated into over a dozen languages. "The Enormity of the Tragedy" is regarded by many as his greatest work. At once a dirty joke and a high brow novel, a baudy tale and an exquisite pastiche, "The Enormity"...tells the bizarre story of Ramon Maria. Ramon is a balding middle aged widower who works as a trumpet player in a burlesque show band. He lives with a stepdaughter who hates him in a house full of books left over from his failed publishing company. One night, having finally managed to persuade the lovely Maria Eugenia, leading lady of the burlesque show, to take him home with her Ramon Maria finds himself too drunk and nervous to adequately do his duty. Meanwhile his step daughter XXXXXX is busy stealing Ramon Maria's money and discovering the first joys and pains of adolescent love. When Ramon Maria wakes up the next day, he finds that his body has compensated for its earlier lethargy by bequeathing the puzzled Don Juan with a massive, never ending erection. As he struggles with the ins and outs of his new condition, one that apparently makes him more attractive to the opposite sex than he has ever been, XXXXXXX's experience with men and hatred of Ramon grow concurrently until finally she resolves to kill her stepfather and live in peace at last...But a straightforward resume of the plot doesn't do justice to a novel that has been hailed across Europe as a masterpiece of literary parody. Newcomers are bound to find Quim Monzo's work funny, endearing and of searing intelligence.

Quim Monzo was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award for fiction; the City of Barcelona Award for fiction; the Prudenci Bertrana Award for fiction; the El Temps Award for best novel; the Lletra d'Or Prize for the best book of the year; the Catalan Writers' Award; he has also been awarded Serra d'Or magazine's prestigious Critics' Award, four times. He has translated the following authors into Catalan: Truman Capote, JD Salinger, Ray Bradbury, Thomas Hardy, Harvey Fierstein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Roald Dahl, Mary Shelley, Roald Dahl, Howard Barker, Arthur Miller... Together with Cuca Canals, he wrote the dialogues for Bigas Luna's movie Jamon, jamon. He has also written the musical satire El tango de Don Joan, with Jerome Savary.

'With an incomparable narrative rhythm, page after page multiplies and augments and surprizes the imaginative capacity of the reader ...Quim Monzo has managed to create a novel in which life and death are drawn with a untameable peculiarity. He has also achieved something more important: that the reader doesn't despair and comes to trust blindly in the morality of high literature ' - El Pais ''Quim Monzo knows Barcelona and its citizens -their work, their obsessions and their comic quirks so well that he creates an image more stimulating than any number of guides' - Le Monde ' Monzo has marshalled a parody that tends towards the grotesque and that resolves itself finally in the cruel and mocking grimace of fate. At at time that distinguishes itself through hyper-representation of itself, when exhibitioism has been converted into the only value that seems to be recognised, it is an immense irony that Monzo is proposing, this is without doubt the best of his books' - La Vanguardia A gifted writer, he draws well on the rich tradition of Spainsh surrealism to put a deliberately paranoic sense of menace in apparently mundane everyday and also to sustain the lyrical, visionary quality of his imagination' - New York Times