The darkly strange stories in Why, Why, Why? by Catalan writer Quim Monzó (A Thousand Morons) expose the tragic absurdities of human relationships. A nurse eager to meet a potential lover laments the inconvenient timing of a patient's death. A prince hunts for toads to kiss, hoping one is his "well-balanced, worthy princess" in an "enchanted state." A wife undergoes surgeries until she's unrecognizable, winning back her cheating husband.
Across whip-quick vignettes--many no more than three pages long--Monzó magnifies the downfalls of characters who typify and satirize the various roles people might assume. Whether spouses or lovers, friends or strangers, the characters exhibit familiar yet catastrophic flaws, relayed through Monzó's matter-of-fact narrative voice: the "good novelist" who "isn't successful enough to frequent top-notch restaurants"; the divorcee "regretting all those years lost to faith in monogamy"; the "heartless man" who discovers "the only path worth following is to increase alcohol intake to the maximum... and wait, longingly, for your liver to burst."
A number of stories espouse the sentiment that we want something only until it's ours. In "Mycology" and "Divine Providence," the fear of making mistakes traps characters in loops. Other entries illustrate fate's power as a butterfly effect--in "Trojan Euphoria," "one thing rapidly follows another," with one man's misplaced train ticket leading to another man's death after catching a suicide jumper. An unexpected few play with mythological and fairytale tropes (Pygmalion, bewitched amphibians, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella). In tales as cautionary as they are wickedly humorous, Monzó's characters self-destruct, while readers can't help but bear witness, asking themselves: Why? --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer