Monstruary - Hardcover

Rios, Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375408231 ISBN 13: 9780375408236

Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A new novel by one of the Spain's most important novelists journeys into the bizarre world of Spanish artist Victor Mons on a playful, creative, erotic odyssey through his life as he creates a series of disturbing, frequently erotic paintings entitled Monstruario that capture images of some of the personal demons that haunt his past. 10,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julián Ríos was born in Galicia, Spain. He contributes to journals in various countries and has edited several fiction and essay series. His previous books, translated into several languages, include the novels Loves That Bind, Larva, Poundemonium, and Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations. He lives in Paris and Madrid.

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Now I don't know if I'm the Mummy or the Invisible Man, said Mons with some difficulty through his bandages, and we laughed, relieved to suppose that along with his good humor he had also recovered his reason. Klaus and I would be the usual monsters again—Klaus the Zombie and Emil the Old Satyr—unless we became the Stick Man and the Abominable Snowman we had been long ago, in the good old London days, and Double Uwe continued his hic-hic-hiccuping, shaking his huge body of a Pantagruelian ogre who devours lines of artists, which is how Mons had painted him. And the three of us, strategically placed at the foot and both flanks of his bed, as if to cut off an impossible escape, helped him to reconstruct the enigma—never more aptly called a hard nut to crack—of his final days and nights in Berlin. Right we are if we think we are? Mons nodded or shook his bandaged head—it was still especially difficult for him to speak—or raised a hand slightly (his hands were bandaged as well) when he couldn't make us understand. Sometimes he opened his eyes wide—two coals, edged in red—through the slits in the bandages. Three days after the accident he was still confused—and agitated at times—by the feeling that the most broken part of him was his memory. He recalled a series of images, disconcerting and disconnected, as if they had come from his own Monstruary. Or from the awful intermittent delirium of the past few hours in which we were capriciously embroiled though we could make out only occasional words and names. Or believed we understood those gabbled sounds.

What's he saying now? But who's he calling? Double Uwe kept repeating.

Melusine, Dr. Koppel deciphered with some satisfaction; but only I, the eminent biographer, as Mons mockingly calls me at times, could know that Melusine was not a product of the painter's imagination—did not come from the gallery of monsters in Monstruary but from his own past: one of the ladies from his heroic days. A French student of fine arts and waitress in London. Her name was Armelle, but Mons changed it to Melusine when she began to disappear mysteriously on Saturdays. Until he discovered that when she went out early on Saturdays, hiding behind dark glasses and carrying a large bag over her shoulder, she was going not to play tennis with a girlfriend but to perform a really high-powered striptease at various Soho clubs in order to pay the rent for the room they shared behind the Portobello Road. At that time Mons was doing portraits in the streets. He would acknowledge his ingratitude when he left her almost overnight after a commission, or rather a stroke of good fortune, allowed him to make the trip to New York he had wanted for so long. Melusine, Dr. Koppel explained to us, was a fairy who had married a count of Poitiers. She would not permit anyone, not even her husband, to see her on Saturdays, because on that day her beautiful legs were transformed into a serpent's tail. Melusine's Striptease is the title of the painting in which a naked Armelle holds up a stocking that looks like a snakeskin.

The spider, Mons seemed to mumble, and I was afraid Dr. Koppel would tell us the story of Arachne. The spider woman? I believe Mons was referring to his stepsister, Ara, who as a child frequently writhed in a net hammock. And was a ballerina. Then I recalled the nude portrait of the slender brunette with straight hair, almond eyes, and a long Modiglianiesque neck, seated on a bench of light wood, her head leaning against her left shoulder, her open hands resting beside her thighs, and a round black hairy spider on her pubis. Miss Tarantula, Mons explained to me. She had worked as a masseuse in a sauna on Wardour Street in the late sixties, and her tattoo was not the least of her charms. Dr. Koppel continued listening, leaning over the mask of bandages.

When I looked at Dr. Koppel, with his bare skull, convex forehead, and deep purplish circles under his eyes, what I really saw was the portrait Mons had recently painted of him in a white coat, bending over a crystal ball in which his almost spherical, all-knowing head was reflected. The psychiatrist reads the future or his own mind? I had asked Mons, who only shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

Mons mumbled again, or moaned, and turned his head toward the window when the doctor asked if he wanted something. To leave? Through the high window you could see the lacy silhouettes of trees like a second dark curtain blown by the wind. As night fell he began to rave again, though he was less agitated than yesterday. Just half an hour earlier the abrupt entrance of a nurse with bright red hair—yes, like a sudden flame—pulled Mons back to his earlier figurations and transfigurations. “Vampire!” is what he said, and he struggled in his bed until the nurse, leaning over him, managed to inject the sedative. We could not suspect that Mons at that moment was seeing—or seeing again in the red blaze--the woman sitting next to a brazier, spreading her thick hair, like threads of blood, over the head and shoulders of the disconsolate man who has taken refuge in her arms and sobs with his face against her breast while she seems to kiss and cradle him but in reality bites the nape of his neck and sucks his blood until he is drained dry. At least that is what Mons claimed on the freezing night in late November when we saw, in an empty lot near Checkpoint Charlie, the girl with hair dyed flaming red who was tilting back a bottle with some truck drivers beside a fire in a steel drum until at last she passed out or began to cry on the shoulder of the youngest one, who seemed as drunk as she was. Or as we were. And she is she is—Mons asserted a little later in a gloomy Kreuzberg café appropriately called Malheur, his tongue stumbling as it usually does when he begins his overwrought skald's epic sagas—she is the image of Petra, his Petrushka, a German girl who was half Polish and half Russian and a chameleon of every stripe—Wigged-out Wig, he called her, though her hair, regularly dyed in streaks of gaudy colors, was her own—who, in addition to painting still lifes of bottles like Morandi and serving drinks, posed as a model and reminded him of his original model, the genuine Crackpot Pole, Eva "Lalka," the Doll, in Polish, that's what she called herself, her artistic name, his muse for a few mad months in London. Between striding down fashion runways and posing for photographs, Eva Lalka still found time to be a Sunday artist, a minimalist photographer, dashing here and there like a squirrel, though in the middle of a session she could suddenly freeze or sink into a lethargy only to revive a short while later, stretching her body to even greater lengths and opening her hollow dark eyes very wide, like the time Mons found her in her darkroom, which was crisscrossed with ropes in a kind of net or strange spider's web. And she appeared caught in the arms of a muscular black model. In order to evoke that multiple Eva who had vanished years before, the chameleonesque German girl was his dark-haired, wasp-waisted La signorina Spalanzani with one hand on her pubis, like Manet's Olympia; and his platinum blond Future Eve, a mechanical mannequin, burnished and compact like some of Leger's tubular figures; and his horrific Kokoschka's Doll, a redhead or rather a brunette with hair half-dyed by recently spilled red wine, or perhaps blood; and then she disappeared from Berlin without a trace. Wasn't she the girl in the phosphorescent wig waiting for clients in a car parked in the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz that snowy night? And he saw her again after almost three months, he was certain—last Thursday, another night of too much drinking, in the artists' commune or rather the monster factory that occupies an entire, entirely decrepit six- or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375408231
• ISBN 13: 9780375408236
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 225
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar