Book 39 - Quin Monzo "Gasoline"
Jun. 8th, 2018 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveQuin Monzo "Gasoline" (Open Letter)
Heribert is a renowned painter whose work is scheduled to be shown in a double exhibition in less than a month. However, he cannot find the motivation to create anything that pleases him. Instead of working on his paintings as the deadline draws near, he spends his mornings lying in bed for hours idly watching the second hand of his clock, and his afternoons and evenings in sex shops, restaurants, and in the company of lovers who bore him (and the reader), as he obsesses about his never present wife, Helena, who is seemingly having an affair of her own.
Our man is felled by an absurd accident which prevents him from completing his assignment, similar to a lazy child who claims that his dog ate his homework. Humbert, a young and unknown artist who happens to be his wife's lover, submits his paintings in his place, to rave reviews, as Heribert wallows in the muck of existential angst.
Gasoline was a thoroughly maddening read, as I found Heribert to be a useless, pathetic and intensely dislikable tortured artiste. This book was supposedly about the creative process in art, but none of its characters captured my attention or earned an ounce of sympathy from me.
Heribert is a renowned painter whose work is scheduled to be shown in a double exhibition in less than a month. However, he cannot find the motivation to create anything that pleases him. Instead of working on his paintings as the deadline draws near, he spends his mornings lying in bed for hours idly watching the second hand of his clock, and his afternoons and evenings in sex shops, restaurants, and in the company of lovers who bore him (and the reader), as he obsesses about his never present wife, Helena, who is seemingly having an affair of her own.
Our man is felled by an absurd accident which prevents him from completing his assignment, similar to a lazy child who claims that his dog ate his homework. Humbert, a young and unknown artist who happens to be his wife's lover, submits his paintings in his place, to rave reviews, as Heribert wallows in the muck of existential angst.
Gasoline was a thoroughly maddening read, as I found Heribert to be a useless, pathetic and intensely dislikable tortured artiste. This book was supposedly about the creative process in art, but none of its characters captured my attention or earned an ounce of sympathy from me.
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