MONSTRUARY
By Julian Rios,
Translated by Edith Grossman
Knopf, 225 pages, $25
At one point in this frisky, postmodern romp by Spanish novelist Julian Rios, one character, Joycean scholar Frank M. Reck, perambulating through Paris during his very own Bloomsday in June 1994, is hit by a taxi at virtually the same spot where French critic and semiologist Roland Barthes was run down by a truck some 14 years earlier. Moreover, he is then taken to the very hospital where James Joyce himself had visited Samuel Beckett in 1938. More even than this, Reck — whose late wife naturally was named Joyce — had been meditating at the time he was hit on the sailor pictured on the pack of Players Navy Cut cigarettes, not knowing that the model for the portrait had been (James) Joyce’s closest friend in Zurich. Only the very dull would mistake all these signs for coincidences.
But if not, what are they? It seems that Reck’s last wreck is just one episode in an almost random string of episodes that could have come from the mind of a Fellini or a Hieronymus Bosch. Instead, they come from the life and work of fictional expatriate Spanish painter Victor Mons; the late Frank Reck is merely one in a series of bizarres who are, have been, or will be the subjects of Mons’ brush, one piece in an evolving series of paintings of human excesses he calls his “Monstruary.”
The novel opens in a hospital in Berlin where Mons is recovering from an accident surrounded by his three musketeers, sculptor Klaus the Zombie (sometimes known as the Stick Man), gallery owner Uwe Wach (“Double Uwe” because of his vast girth), and Emil the Old Satyr (or the Abominable Snowman or the Eminent Biographer), a writer who turns out to be Mons’ Boswell and the narrator of the subsequent festivities.
Those festivities take place in a sort of psychic demimonde where hardly anyone is who they seem and where the only constant is art, or at least the somewhat peculiar art of Victor Mons. His creative process begins with the assemblage of various off-center characters, frequently from chance encounters. He then filters whatever their particular passions and quirks may be through his own experiences and imaginings before finally transforming their sometimes bestial essences into one of his “Monster Pieces.” The result is that the artist consumes his subjects, making them his own, part of his singular vision, often making them victims of his own fixations. “Mons,” observes Emil at one point, “had the ability to make the most monstrous things seem natural, the most truthful seem utterly absurd.”
As the painter listens to and then absorbs the stories of those who sit for him, the novel, chameleon-like, takes on a variety of casts, becoming alternately painterly, literary and architectural, with occasional accents of eroticism and wretchedness. One of his subjects is an architect who has been to so many cities and seen so many buildings that the memories of them swim together in his mind, producing a dreamscape of imaginary spires, cornices, roofs and towers merged into a single fantasy setting. On another occasion, Mons finds an old woman perpetually sitting in the lobby of a hotel, discovers that she is a wealthy art patron, then further discovers that she may in fact be an actress playing the role of a wealthy art patron, and decides, of course, that there is a place for her in the “Monstruary.”
Illusion piles on illusion until whatever reality there once (or ever) was has been blurred beyond all possibility of recall. This dispersal of authenticity is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, perhaps the essential one. The plot, such as it ever is in such fiction, is nothing more than a blueprint of a grand but shadowy structure. From that outline the writer pours a foundation and throws up a few girders in the form of playful, often obscure allusions, sometimes as semiprivate in-jokes, sometimes as puns in a variety of languages, sometimes as references to other, completely different novels by completely different authors.
As a consequence, the postmodern novel is really a conspiracy between writer and reader to come up with meaning-meaning that becomes various depending upon just who makes up the second half of the partnership. While it is the business of the party of the first part to provide references that are somewhat accessible, the business of the party of the second part is to be knowledgeable enough to grasp at least some of them. The novelist assembles all the materials in one place, and it then becomes the responsibility of the reader to assemble everything into a recognizable structure, or at least into a structure recognizable to that particular reader. The process is not, in other words, like curling up with the latest Danielle Steel.
This is the sort of novel Rios delivers in “Monstruary.” Filled with wordplay and language games all of which translator Edith Grossman appears to be absolutely on top of, the book has a floating center of gravity, moving from dark to light and back again but never quite settling down. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the author’s previous work. “Loves That Bind,” for instance, is written in epistolary form about an infatuation revealed in a man’s letters to a lost love describing the “other women” in his life who turn out to be 26 literary heroines from past classics, such as Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan, Nabokov’s Lolita and Joyce’s Molly Bloom. “Poundemonium” is a word-obsessed tribute to Ezra Pound “written” by three different characters, while “Larva” recounts the story of Don Juan played out in the course of a contemporary masquerade party in an abandoned London mansion.
Rios’ latest fits right in with its predecessors. It, too, is liberated from the conventions of plot and narrative; it, too, possesses a final structure that wanders about from place to place, making occasional and provocative points (particularly about art, literature and the scope of the human imagination) but then moving on before the points have a chance to harden. Put another way, this is not the sort of novel that readers can just cruise through and accept on its own, clearly defined terms. Instead, “Monstruary” is a conglomeration of terms, a kind of summary of a number of things that have come before it, from “Tristram Shandy” through Flaubert and “Finnegans Wake” to Cezanne and Van Gogh. To those not familiar with such a multilayered, variable construction, reading it can be tedious and frustrating.
But to anyone willing to put in a lot of work and dredge up a lot of literary and artistic memories, that experience can offer great rewards. You will get out of it only as much as you can put into it, to be sure, but for some, especially for those with enough in their memory banks to contribute to the final product, that should be more than enough.
