This masterful two-volume autobiography first published in the mid-1980s, broke new ground in Spanish letters with its introspective sexual and emotional honesty.
This reworked and streamlined version of Goytisolo's 1975 novel spins the reader through an angry, prickly catalogue of Spanish colonialism and slavery.
An experimental novel by a Spaniard. The narrator, a writer who has lost a woman friend, imagines himself accompanying her on the 40-day journey which, according to Islamic tradition, souls take between death and eternity.
In Makbara, Juan Goytisolo -- widely considered Spain's greatest living writer -- again dazzles the reader with his energetic, stylistic prose, which he himself compares to a snake: cunning, sly, sinuous. But the themes in Makbara are perhaps more universal than in his earlier works. Makbara is full of its own kind of warmth, humor, and love. After all, makbara is an Arab word referring to the spot in North African cemeteries where young couples meet for romantic encounters. Sex, for Goytisolo, is clearly the greatest cosmic joke, the great leveller. "Sex," he says, "is above all freedom.
In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist—the Parisian "Monster of Le Sentier"—is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued, he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the way—the imam "Alice," a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi—our "Monster" revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly real, Exiled from Almost Everywhere hurtles the reader through our troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.
Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Don Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo s trilogy (including Marks of Identity and Juan the Landless), this story of an exiled Spaniard confronts all of Goytisolo s own worst fears about fascist Spain. The narrator identifies himself with the real Don Julian, the Great Traitor who allegedly opened the gates of Spain to an invasion of Moors and the consequent eight hundred years of Islamic Influence. For the narrator, nothing short of the total destruction of Spain and all things Spanish will be an acceptable punishment for his exile.
Provides an examination of the tensions that exist between the West and Islamic societies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s, provide historical analysis and first-person reportage of life in four war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. Goytisolo shows how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political, and cultural confrontation. --From publisher description.
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