* (restored)
I can’t remember now which book of Juan Goytisolo’s I first read, or why and how I came across this brilliant author. My memories suggest that it may simply be that his works in translation were published by Serpent’s Tail publishers and at the time I had discovered many an exciting new author by looking out for that distinctive jagged spine on the shelves of my favourite bookshop.
Goytisolo’s books were dense, full of rambling sentences and complicated plots that seemed to center on memory and mythology, as well as homosexual attraction, familial and poltical oppression and a love for the extended Arab world and its citizens. His books were ‘difficult’ and required some degree of effort to sustain the flow as sentences carried on for pages at a time, but the effort was worthwhile and rewarded. Its perhaps fair to say too that, particularly for some of his earlier works, Goytisolo hasn’t always been well served by his translators.
His more recent books have proved both shorter and simply – easier to read – though still engaging in big ideas. If you haven’t read anything by Juan Goytisolo than I recommend him highly.
David C
Some Biographical Notes
Juan Goytisolo is a prolific Spanish writer of poetry, novels and non-fiction. Much of his work has been translated into English. Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War and his mother killed in the first Francoist air raid in 1938. He published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. His opposition to the Franco government led to his voluntary exile to Paris in 1956 where he worked as a reader for Gallimard. Despite taking male lovers, Juan Goytisolo was married to the publisher and novelist Monique Lange, who died in 1996. After her death he moved to Marrakesh where he has lived since 1997.
Words of Praise
“What distinguishes Goytisolo from other writers in the ever-widening international confraternity of young protesters is the clinical objectivity of his vision and the vigorous control he displays over his powerful, driving style. His works — short, violent and frightening — are like pages torn out of the book of experience.” – Helen Cantarella, The New York Times Book Review, 18 March 1962
“(T)he foremost novelist of contemporary Spain” – Carlos Fuentes, The New York Times Book Review, 5 May 1974
“Thoroughly seduced by literary theory, Goytisolo maintains that a fiction writer should respond to movements in poetics and he invokes Russian formalists and French structuralists as patron saints. He tests his readers with punctuation-free interior monologues, citations in Latin and Arabic, dialogues in foreign languages, passages in mock Old Spanish, pastiche, unreliable narrators. The result is at times dazzling, but readability can hardly be counted among its merits. This may be intentional. One is not expected to curl up by the fire with a book by Goytisolo, but rather to be jolted out of any such bourgeois complacency in the first place.” – Martin Schifino, Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 2002
“unsettling, apocalyptic . . . a strange mixture of pitiless autobiography, the debunking of mythologies and conformist fetishes, passionate exploration of the periphery of the west – in particular the Arab world – and audacious linguistic experiment” – Mario Vargas Llosa
“Goytisolo made sacrifices for both his literature and his politics. In a culture that now is evolved and permissive, but was then full of macho uptightness, his autobiography brought a note of total frankness. Homosexuality challenges the exploitation of women and role playing, the silences of personal life.” – Edmund White
“What was appealing to me when I first came across Juan Goytisolo’s books in the 1980’s, was that here was an experimental European novelist who had renounced the flat realism of the 19th-century novel and who was paying attention to my part of the world with an extraordinary humility, searching in his life and prose to create a different style enriched by what he’s found in this culture.” – Orhan Pamuk
The Books (a select and incomplete bibliography)
Novels
Marks of Identity (1966) (Señas de identidad, trans. Gregory Rabassa, 1969)
Count Julian (1970) (Reivindicación del conde don Julián, trans. Helen Lane, 1974)
Juan the Landless (1975) (Juan sin Tierra, trans. Helen Lane, 1977)
In this semi-autobiographical trilogy Juan Goytisolo explores the idea of exile. In Marks of Identity a Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona, to reject Spain and conclude that every man carries his own exile about with him, wherever he lives. With Count Julian, we find the narrator fulminating against Spain, the country he has been forced to leave, and dreaming of invading his fatherland and destroying it completely. Goytisolo takes the historic character of Count Julian, who betrayed Spain by allowing an Arab entrance in 711 out of personal revenge against the Visigoth king Rodrigo, the rapist of his daughter, as the light to follow through the dark tunnel of destruction he goes into. In the final book Juan the Landless Goytisolo continues his theme of exile but moves from a focus on his hostility to the land of his birth to a celebration of Arab culture.
Excerpts
from Marks of Identity
That was how they were talking about you when the incident of the documentary became known, in cafes and gatherings, meetings and parties, the self-satisfied men and women with whom a laughable decree of fate had awarded you at birth as fellow countrymen: dim childhood friends, innocuous schoolmates, female relatives with cold and severe looks, virtuous and sad acquaintances, all entrenched in their impregnable class privileges, conspicuous and right-thinking members of an autumnal and doddering world which they had given to you, without asking your permission, with religion, morals and laws made to its measure: a promiscuous and hollow order from which you tried to escape, confident, like so many others, of a regenerating change and catharsis which, because of mysterious imponderables, had not come about and, after long years in exile, there you were again, in the painful and affectionate landscape of your childhood, deprived even of the bitter consolation of alcohol, while the eucalyptus trees in the garden aired their green branches and changeable and flighty clouds floated toward the sun like somber swans, feeling yourself less the prodigal son who humbles his brow before his father than the criminal who furtively returns to the scene of his crime, while the Voices – the congenital evil and frustration of your caste joined in one chorus – treacherously continued their dull singsong whispering in your ear: “you who have been one of us and have broken with us have the right to many things and it is not hard for us to see that you have the right to think that your contry is living a really atrocious existence we are sorry for your error but who has put up any gates in the fields Andalusian farmers are the only one who allow themselves that luxury and that is where those solitary isolated gates come from ones that seem neither to close nor to open outside of that exception which is like poetic license no one is obliging you to pass through the arch go ahead then with your ideas about politics and and other realities of Spain go right ahead too if it pleases you with your annoyances and mortifications concerning the racial qualities of our breed who is stopping you we know what you are a Barcelonan in spite of your Asturian name but Asturian or Barcelonan supposing that Barcelona does not inspire any emotion in you or the land of Asturias raise any warm feeling in your soul turn your back on all of us and look toward the horizons why must you contradict a spontaneous movement of your soul if some feeling carries you along pathways of such indescribable sadness after all you will not be the first Spaniard to stop loving his country but why come back then it would be better for your to stay away and renounce us once and for all think abou tit you still have time our firmness is unmovable and none of your efforts will succeed in undermining it we are made of stone and we will remain stone why do you blindly seek disaster forget about us and we will forget about you your birth was a mistake bear with it.
from Count Julian
Tariq’s hosts are awaiting your signal to fling themselves upon her and force open the portals of the ancient temple
you will whip her soundly, with swift unerring strokes, and will impassively witness the efficacious touch of their lips, open like a fresh wound, and the reptilian ecstasy of their pitilessly cruel asps
the futile struggle of the damsel who protests her innocence, pleads for mercy and forgiveness, before modestly yielding to her torturers and finally submitting, with bestial docility to their stubborn, imperious cobras
and in ringing, forcible tones, you will address them thus
hearken to my words
you Arabs with vulgar members, coarse rough skin, clumsy hands, greedy mouths
prepare your poison-filled needle
virgins made fecund by long centuries of modesty and decency are impatiently awaiting the horn-thrust
their tender thighs, their soft breasts are crying out to be attacked, to be bitten
leap at the opportunity
violate the sanctuary and the grotto, the citadel and the cavern, the bastion and the alcazar
penetrate the hollow mercilessly
the Cunt, the Cunt, the Cunt!
from Juan the Landless
according to Hindustani gurus, in the superior phase of meditation the human body, purged of its appetites and desires, abandons itself with delight to an ethereal existence, freed from passions and vices, attentive only to a gentle flow of a time without end, as light winged as those soaring little birds of passage seemingly obeying only the soft and melodious inspiration of an invisible breeze and musically absorbed in remote contemplation of the sea: sensory stimuli and sensory excitations no longer have any effect on it, and immersed in the beneficent languor of an eternal present, it loftily disdains the absurd slavery of lustful pleasures, pure, svelte, airy,weightless, with the delicate fluidity of those clouds which at eventide enhance the majesty of autumnal landscapes, far from the world’s feverish, frantic hustle and bustle: rising above the tyranny of pretty contingency and hence offering to the devout admiration of the vulgar the solemn and tranquil demeanour of the ascetic purified by his acts of penitence and his fasts, the smiling indifference of the Brahman martyr face to face with the preparations being made for his own death, the serene composure of the fakir gracefully reclining on his bed of nails: but the body that observes you from the corner of the table, from the bright coloured jacket of the Hi-fi record, appears to be proclaiming violently, in a shriek almost, that never, absolutely never, will it attain, even in the improbable case that this might have been a deliberate goal that it had set itself, to the superior phase of transcendental meditation, the austere but ineffable pleasures of the beatific contemplative life: neither an anchorite nor a fakir nor a Brahman: merely a body: an extension of matter in space: an offspring of the earth, to earth forever united: united of a tight neat line, a carefully confined surface, a lissome slenderness, a plethora of flesh, baroque splendor, an opulent and fruitful, bountiful, fertile body, solidly rooted in the inferior world that to a pair of feet which, though left out of the artistic composition of the portrait, give one every reason to believe that they are the equal of the rest in grandeur, prodigality, and excess: naked feet, doubtless, seeking the direct, symbiotic contact that draws forth from the primordial substance the life-force, the powers of generation: for a rich sap nourishes this body and sustains it, generously helps it to thrive, invents fabulous convexities: the confining edge of the low cut neckline can scarcely contain them and favours a vast unfurling of waves which, although concealed beneath the velvety suppleness of the fabric, nonetheless prove appetizing to the eyes of the judicious spectator: roiled, towering surfaces which, from the imposing chin line downward, descend with windmill-like fury to the frontal apotheosis: a double crest, a supreme sea swell that the fearful Antillean hurricane has catapulted to the dizzying heights of an incredible prominence: the fatal wave rising in awesome splendor moments before crashing down upon the disaster area and sweeping away with wrathful provision the habitations, chattel, towns, industries, crops of an area teeming with life, transforming it, in the wink of an eye, into a dreary and desolate quagmire, abandoned to the moans of the victims, the barking of dogs, the hovering of vultures, sacking by looters and the starving, and the eager though tardy zeal of well-intentioned international charity organizations………………………..
Makbara (1980) (Makbara, trans. Helen Lane, 1981)
A novel whose essential theme is love, full with wit and black humour
“In the beginning was the cry: alarm, anguish, terror, chemically pure pain?: prolonged, sustained, piercing to the limits of the tolerable: phantom, spectre, monster from the nether world; a disturbing intrusion at any event: disruption of the urban rhythm, of the harmonious chorus of sounds and voices of super-numeraries and beautifully dressed actors and actresses: an oneiric apparition: an insolent, brutish defiance: a strange, transgressive presence; a radical negation of the existing order: index finger pointed accusingly at the happy, self-confident Eurocraticonsuming city: with no need to raise his eyes, strain his voice, extend his beggar’s hand with a black gesture of Luciferian pride…”
Excerpt
Landscapes After the Battle (1982) (Paisajes después de la batalla, trans. Helen Lane, 1987)
Landscapes after the Battle is a short novel, consisting of 78 often fancifully titled chapters. It is a political novel; but it is also decidedly literary. It begins with the citizens of La Sentier in Paris waking up one morningto find that all the writing around them is no longer in the familiar Latin alphabet, but has been replaced by an indecipherable Arabic scrawl. The slow transformation of the district under the steady inflow of immigrants has taken complete hold, and the locals have become strangers in their own strange land.
Manuscript pages
The Virtues of the Solitary Bird (1988) (Las virtudes del pájaro solitano, trans. Helen Lane, 1993)
Weaving together elements of philosophy, history and the terror of the Plague, this novel was inspired by the story of St John of the Cross (one of the earliest victims of Torquemada’s search for heretics) and again addresses Goytisolo’s key theme of exile as well as the heritage of Spanish mysticism, traced from its roots in “triple-caste Spain” – Jewish, Moorish, Christian – through its infamous Inquisition to Franco’s lost decades and their contemporary aftermath.
Quarantine (1991) (La cuarentena, trans. Peter Bush, 1994)
In this work, set during the first Gulf War, the narrator looks at the present through the spirit of a dead friend, whose soul, in accordance with Islamic teachings, is condemned to wander for 40 days between death and eternal life. The nameless narrator, a writer based in Paris, learns of a friend’s sudden death and joins her in the shadowy afterworld by dint of a leap of consciousness. Together and separately, they have chance encounters with celestial nomads who judge the dead. News of contemporary events, including the Gulf War, filters through to them and mingles with other searing images of carnage and brutality. Besides injecting an eloquent antiwar message, Goytisolo draws parallels between the soul’s journey in the next world and the act of writing, which to him involves “abolishing the frontiers between reality and dream.”
“a scholarly rumination on Christian and Muslim attitudes toward death and homosexuality, as refracted through Dante, the 12th-century Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, Joyce, the 20th-century Russian linguistic philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as the Spanish version of the Kamasutra written by a converted Muslim in the 16th century.” – Peter Bush
Excerpt
Afterwards, fatally after what had happened, he looked back, first alone, then with his wife, for the telltale signs of imminent departure, the symptoms of exodus. He recalled her sitting by the low table in his old study smiling trustingly just as in the photograph I’m looking at now as she took out one of her Gauloises Bleues or stubbed it out carefully in the improvised ashtray. They were talking about the Comedy and its connections with Islamic mysticism. Already unknowingly hanging on the inexorable countdown of fragile heartbeats, she had read excitedly: But my heart assumes all shapes: / the monk’s cloister, the idols’ shrine, / the gazelles’ meadow, the pilgrim’s Kaaba, / the tablets of the Torah, the text of the Koran. / I profess the creed of love / which, wherever it points the way, / will always be my faith and doctrine. If the mantle of charity spans the whole of creation and if even the mineral realm — a community just like any other! — glorified Creation, hadn’t Ibn Arabi rent the veils and limitations of Dante in his vision of the afterlife? He looked through the half-opened window at the slate roofs and the array of variegated clouds brightly colored by the sun with an emotion he hadn’t properly understood, so immersed was he in the purely literary dimension of the conversation. Then, suddenly, she had talked calmly about the violence of the universe. Not of the tiny planet where they lived but the immeasurable violence of the Cosmos: fiery stars emitting lethal rays; cold, dead stars; novas diffusing radioactive particles; quasars irradiating fabulous, incomprehensible energy; spiral, galactic nebula; black holes whose gravitational pull sucks into a swirling vortex the celestial bodies that have strayed into their vicinity. The fantastic, unimaginable, savage violence of stars situated millions of light years from our diminutive galaxy which consume a minimal part of their energy in the brief span of their existence then disappear in explosions of unheard-of proportions, giving rise to brutal collisions, staggeringly powerful radio waves, dizzy expansions, a chain of catastrophes in a world of sound and fury, that voracious world based on chaos, litigation, on the blind meeting of opposed forces described by Rojas in La Celestina, if you remember? She stopped. A question floated in the air he couldn’t put into words: was there a particle of love and sweetness in that orb that was not prey to annihilation and terror? They both went silent and contemplated the ever more threatening and strange shapes of the clouds, their dark, serried ranks. It’s going to rain, she said finally, getting up out of her chair.
The Marx Family Saga (1993) (La saga de los Marx, trans. Peter Bush, 1996)
A lighter hearted novel, but still packing a powerful punch, in which a resurrected Karl Marx toure Europe. The novel begins with a dramatic description of Albanian refugees landing on a posh private beach in Italy, carrying photocopied dollars and dreaming of Dallas. Its soon revealed that this is as seen on television by Karl Marx and his family in their home in Dean St, somehow transplanted to the present. Marx contemplates the fall of communism in Russian and Eastern Europe, debating its implications – while Bakunin clowns his way around Europe, posing as a billionaire and begging for money on the metro. The Marx Family Saga is a surreal fantasy with something of the logic of a dream, erratic in course and disjointedly plotted but not difficult to read.
Pages
State of Siege (1995) (El sitio de los sitios, trans. Helen Lane, 2002)
In the early 90’s, during the breakup of Yugoslavia, Goytisolo was encouraged to visit Sarajevo by his friend Susan Sontag. He wrote weekly reports for El Pais, describing the re-engaged nationalisms and butchery that was taking place in the heart of Europe. During this period he also wrote this short novel, constructed in concentric circles in which Sarajevan scholars to eulogise their lost heritage of syncretism; a dead Spanish writer called JG revisits his happiest hours spent performing blowjobs in bathhouses; and in which Goytisolo inflicts the fate of Sarajevo on his own neighbourhood of Paris – with snipers randomly picking off the innocent inhabitants as the authorities cut of gas, electricity and telephone lines.
The Garden of Secrets (1997) (Las semanas del jardín, trans. Peter Bush, 2000)
In this work a group of 28 readers, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet, gather to reconstruct the life of a Spanish poet, Eusebio – a homosexual friend of the great authors Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda – who is arrested by Franco’s forces and imprisoned in the military psychiatric center in Melilla at the beginning of the 1936 rebellion and disappeared. Each proposes his or her part of the story in a short chapter. Did he escape with his male lover to become a Muslim mystic? Was he “re-educated” by fascist psychologists to become a loyal follower of Franco? There is no single truth and Goytisolo celebrates the process of storytelling (of style and genre) itself.
Excerpt
‘You are, my friend, Eugenio Asensio, you’re born again, you’ve changed names and, for the good of Spain, your previous and devious personality.’ Comrade Basilio smiled at him with the aplomb and rigour bestowed by rank. He wore the uniform of the Falange: red beret, boots, blue shirt, yoke and arrows. He had summoned him to his office and, for the first time since the events, somebody was addressing him, if not affectionately, at least warmly.
‘By a whisker your brother-in-law’s intervention saved you from meeting your Maker; you were on the list of Reds to be executed. Your poor sister wept her heart out, begged and begged till her husband gave in. That was when they took you from the garage where you were shoved cheek by jowl with those destined for the paseo, handcuffed and blindfolded, to get round the duty officer who wasn’t in on the act. You can’t imagine the stratagems your family’s friends had recourse to, what obstacles they confronted to sneak you out of Melilla and bring you here in one piece. They saved you from the fate of Federico, a good lad when all’s said and done, like you tricked by envy-ridden intellectuals and politicos in the pay of the Anti-Spain. Now you’re in a safe haven and we’ll do what was agreed. Put behind you who you were, your shameful penchant for Mohammeds and labourers, bad friends and twisted ideas. From now on my comrades and I will see to it you become a wholesome man, wear the uniform expressing our all-embracing, combative spirit, strengthen yourself body and soul, espouse the values consubstantial with the fatherland forged by its martyrs’ bloody sacrifice. Look at your new documentation: the dates haven’t changed, your place of origin has. You were born in the Canary Islands, like our Army of Salvation. Your name is Eugenio Asensio Garcia. Eugenio, because, as one of the luminaries of our thought writes, with characteristic rigour and lucidity the eugenic cleansing and regeneration of a people has to impact on the totality of its constituent individuals, to create an ethnically improved, morally robust and spiritually vigorous caste. A eugenics to liberate individuals from damaging cancers and return them, via a programme of proper mental and physical hygiene, to the incubator, to germinate and blossom as in a greenhouse, forged against the corrupting environment, by the sacred store of principles firing our Crusade.
‘I know what it means for you to cut all ties with a person of your sister’s stature and capacity for love. She’s in tears as well but feels happy and grateful to her husband. She has sworn to him she’ll not try to contact you and I’ll be responsible for informing her of your progression to a total cure. From now you’ll be among men, the leaders and fighters of the Falange, determined to shape their lives after the example of their Founder. There’s no room here for the moral scruples of English laydeez or any soft-soaping:
this is no convent. The mannered ways of hypocrites and do-gooders are not our scene. Our life is one of obedience, discipline, militia: the militarisation of school, university, factory, workshop, of every pore of society. We don’t want rewards, Laureates or Medals of Suffering for the Fatherland. Hierarchy is based on merit, selflessness and vigour in the service of Spain. By my side, by the side of Veremundo and his doughty fighters, you’ll learn the virtues of manliness, the longing after perfection of Greek philosophers and German artists. When it’s time to work and do your duty, work and do your duty like the next man; when it’s time to have a good time, on the razzle and the beer, enjoy yourself, satisfy the body. We won’t force you to go to brothels if you’re still in two minds and their ways put you off. But gradually we’ll inculcate in you noble tastes and desires. Proper male camaraderie excludes all forms of hypocrisy and cant.
‘Stop reading palsied prose, absorb the tough truths of José Antonio, the essays of Ramiro de Maeztú, Onésimo Redondo and Ledesma Ramos. Choose between the peaks and the abyss, between anarchy and the Renaissance ideal of the poet-soldier. Your bohemian, egg-head mentors generate castrated, masturbatory art: abstract drawings, dramas of adultery, trite, effeminate poetry, novels inciting class struggle. Tasteless, stinking fruit falling apart in the hands like rotten apples. Whoever sidesteps truth and denies the sap of our spirit misses out on beauty, inverts the proper scale of values, undermines his labour, dilutes his genius, embitters life.
‘Here’s a letter from your sister, and inspired by the admirable generosity and grandeur of her soul, against what’s been agreed, I’ll read you a paragraph: “Tell him to try and be happy and adapt to his new state. I’ll keep him present in my memories but I understand how he needs to remake his life far from me. The gratitude I owe God and my husband compensates my grief at his absence. Dear Lord, I hope to see him one day when peace rules and embrace him in my arms as if he were still a child!”‘
Basilio filed the letter in its folder and, after a pensive silence, invited him to get up and look through the window with him: a phalanx of energetic, able-bodied youths, supple and healthy-looking, marched by in warrior step to Veremundo’s whistles and orders, one two, one two, right, left, half-turn, halt, attention and intone the ‘Cara al sol’ before they break ranks and cheerfully, noisily disperse in the barrack yard, in a spontaneous show of camaraderie to warm the cockles of his heart.
A Cock-eyed Comedy (2000) (Carajicomedia, trans. Peter Bush, 2002)
A satiric potshot at the Spanish Catholic Church, lampooning the recently canonized founder of Opus Dei as a homosexual whose minions trawl the public toilets in search of converts.
Blind Rider (2005) (Telón de boca, trans. Peter Bush, 2005)
“The book of his life lacked a plot: there were only fragments of pages, loose or ill-fitting pieces, outlines of a possible theme. The inconsistency of the drafts allowed for no closure or exemplary glow… He wanted to be beither role model nor statue. His attelpt to avoid any acceptable definition or morality responded to that wish. His writing left no traces: he wasn’t the sum total of his books, but what was subtracted from them. Only the release contract was missing and that would be along soon.”
In this novel, the narrator, reviews his life in a fictional memoir of the last fifty odd years. It is an extended eulogy to loss – of his wife and the years of love they shared, of his mother, and of the hopes for a more utopian. perhaps more innocent, world. Goytisolo explores Tolstoy, grief, God, and the idea of home. With short beautifully written chapters he creates a work that is both tender and touching, and rages with anger against a perverse god who literally shat out the world.
Quote
Time was a blind rider nobody could unsaddle. As he galloped, he ravaged all that seemed enduring, transformed landscapes, reduced dreams to ashes.
Non fiction
Forbidden Territory (1985) (Coto vedado, trans. Peter Bush, 1989)
The first volume of Juan Goytisolo’s memoirs – covering the shadows of the Spanish Civil War, and then World War II, and Goytisolo’s account of his childhood and family. Among the defining incidents in the author’s life is the tragic death of Goytisolo’s mother, killed in a bombing attack; molestation by his grandfather; and the world of books and literature. The book takes us up to Goytisolo’s early experiments with writing, radical politics and sex.
Realms of Strife: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1957-1982 (1986) (En los reinos de taifa, trans. Peter Bush, 1990)
This book continues Juan Goytisolo’s concentrating on his life in the 1960s and early 1970s, and only briefly touching on later times. This work offers chunks of his life, focussing around specific events and people. Living mainly in Paris with long-time companion (and later wife) Monique, Goytisolo achieved quick critical success with his first novel. Much of his early time in Paris was centered around the French publishing house, Gallimard, where Monique worked and where he also was involved in finding Spanish authors and books to translate. Goytisolo moved in illustrious literary circles, and there is a lot of name-dropping here, including details of Genet, Cortazar and a number of Latin American and Spanish authors. He writes of visits to Cuba and the Soviet Union and of his acknowledgement of his attraction to a certain type of young Arab male. He finally admits his yearnings (and that he acted on them) to Monique in a letter, most of which he prints here verbatim.
More Reading
Maya Jaggi, “Scourge of the New Spain” Guardian August 12, 2000
When the Spanish dictator Franco died 25 years ago, Juan Goytisolo felt liberated. “I discovered that my real, tyrannical father was Franco,” he says, “my mother was killed by his bombs, my family destroyed, and he forced me to become an exile. Everything I created was a result of the civil war.”
Yet for the child of the 1936-39 Spanish civil war, whose books were banned under the victorious Franco regime, liberation came too late. He was living with a Frenchwoman and moving between Paris and his adopted land of Morocco. “It would have been impossible to have a third life in Spain. I love Spanish culture but hate Spanish society; I can’t live there.”
ttp://books.guardian.co.uk/internationalwriting/story/0,6194,353291,00.html
Julio Ortega, trans. Joseph Schraibman “An Interview with Juan Goytisolo”
Juan Goytisolo: There is, in fact, a common denominator to the three texts that you mentioned- the two novels and the critical study of Blanco White on which I worked for the last two years- and this common denominator is, as you point out, the problem of exile. Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country. It is the exposition of a moral wound in a man of my generation who has had to live through one of the most sepulchral periods of peace in the lengthy history of Spain, a person who has been in the anomalous situation of growing old without having ever known youth or responsibility (as you well know, the Spanish people live in a perpetual state of legal adolescence since April 1, 1939). In Count Julian the process of being dispossessed and breaking with his homeland on the part of the narrator has already taken place.
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_goytisolo.html
Fernanda Eberstadt “The Anti-Orientalist” New York Times, 16 April, 2006
On a blazing blue afternoon last winter, I met the Spanish expatriate novelist Juan Goytisolo at an outdoor cafe in Marrakesh. It was easy to spot the 75-year-old writer, sitting beneath an Arabic-language poster of himself taped to the cafe window. He was reading El País, the Spanish newspaper to which he has contributed for decades. Olive-skinned, with a hawk nose and startlingly pale blue eyes, he had wrapped himself against the winter chill in a pullover, suede jacket, checked overcoat and two pairs of socks.
Considered by many to be Spain’s greatest living writer, Goytisolo is in some ways an anachronistic figure in today’s cultural landscape. His ideas can seem deeply unfashionable. For him, writing is a political act, and it is the West, not the Islamic world, that is waging a crusade. He is a homosexual who finds gay identity politics unappealing and who lived for 40 years with a French woman he considers his only love. “I don’t like ghettos,” he informed me. “For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we’s.” The words most commonly used to describe his writing are “transgressive,” “subversive,” “iconoclastic.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/magazine/16goytisolo.html?ex=1164344400&en=35c4fe6daf736d5b&ei=5070
Douglas Messerli “Truth Telling in a World of Lies” Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 2001
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/messerli/essays/messerli_goytisolo.html
Peter Bush, “Interview: Juan Goytisolo” Bookforum, Winter 2002
I accompanied Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren on a trip to the south of Spain, the Almería I described in Campos de Níjar. My friendship with Genet was deeper and more lasting. He was a great moral influence and turned me away from my youthful vanity in relation to literary life. He made me see the difference between a love of literary circles and a love of literature. Anyway, Paris was a vibrant intellectual scene, dazzling to a newcomer from Fascist Spain. But there were limits to French liberty, and we helped the FLN in the struggle to liberate Algeria with petitions and demonstrations. Monique’s flat was a kind of safe house. In the midst of this I discovered my homosexuality and was thrown into a quest for a subjective authenticity in my life. In my writing the quest began with Marks of Identity. http://www.bookforum.com/archive/win_02/interview_goyt.html
Obituary
Veteran Spanish anti-Franco writer Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain’s most celebrated writers of the postwar period, died Sunday aged 86, his agent said.
The novelist and essayist, who won the Cervantes Prize — Spain’s version of the Nobel — in 2014, died in Marrakesh, Morocco, “surrounded by his loved ones,” said the Carmen Balcells agency in a statement.
A member of Spain’s Royal Academy, he had suffered from health problems for some months, including a fractured hip which had forced him to use a wheelchair
He was born in 1931 in Barcelona to a bourgeois family. His mother was killed when he was seven, in an air raid by the forces of right-wing General Francisco Franco during the civil war.
He went into exile in France due to his “total disagreement” with the Franco regime and the censorship it imposed.
He flirted with the communist party during the late 1950s, which brought him a four-month jail term, but he was inspired more by his opposition to the Franco dictatorship than by proletarian conviction.
He began writing at the age of 11, encouraged by his uncle Luis, and his first novels were published after attending law school.
In “Las Afueras” (1958) and “Las Mismas Palabras” (1962) he displayed literary traits that would appear in later works: the importance of dialogue, the absence of a main character, multiple points of view.
This complexity was again in evidence in his tetralogy “Antigonia”, his most celebrated work. Set in the youth culture of Barcelona in the 1950s and 1960s, it is made up of “Recuento” (1973), “Los Verdes de Mayo Hasta el Mar” (1976), “La Colera de Aquiles” (1979) et “Teoria del Conocimiento” (1981).
Goytisolo explores life in all its facets, from childhood to death, in a complex mixture of memories, introspection and reflections on the work of a writer.
“I never stopped evolving a more complex style, formed from multiple perspectives and simultaneous plots,” he said.
The recipient of several awards in Spain, he also published more experimental works in the 1980s and 90s such as “Estela de Fuego que se aleja”, “Estatua con palomas”, “La Paradoja del ave migratoria” up to his last novel “Cosas que Pasan”.
But few of his works have been translated and he never achieved worldwide recognition, something that he never got over.
He once said that France’s Nobel literature laureate Claude Simon “wrote that the three greats novels of the 20th century were (Proust’s) ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ (by Lawrence Durrell) and ‘Antigonia’. That is some compensation.”
He has railed against the decline of an era of great novels, “those that provoke energy in the reader, and up to a certain point transform their relationship with the world and themselves,” in favour of best-sellers.
He believes this is a “long process which has only just begun” and is inevitable in “a society turned toward … television, the telephone, and the computer.”
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p.s. Hey. ** Thomas Kendall, Hi, Tom. Mm, maybe. I mean, I believe that Rothko and Tarkovsky believe in what their work is purporting. And I like that belief and their ambition to find a way to communicate and share it. Hey, I do the same thing in my work. The fact that it feels like a lot of heavy hot air to me is my problem. And I don’t dislike their work like I do the work of someone like, say, Anselm Kiefer whose heaviness feels false and obnoxious to me. And the holiness with which people regard their work doesn’t bother me as much as it does with, say, Cy Twombly, who just seems like a dilettante, bullshitty dabbler to me. I’m not sure if my anarchism is at play in my ‘not getting it’. Quite possibly, although one could say Bresson’s work is heavy and imposing too. So I don’t know. Curious. Thanks for posing that, man. I hope you’re greater than great. ** David Ehrenstein, RIP Robert Morse. And Cynthia Plastercaster. ** Misanthrope, I know plenty o’ people who eat plenty of meat and seem horse-level healthy. I’m a big protein intake guy. My diet is 80% protein and 20% whatever else. And I’m horse healthy. Who fucking knows, in other words. Aces about Kayla’s job. She’s a good egg. ** Bill, I love Gilbert Peyre, as you well know, and I would sure think he fits in there, yes. Not sure into which subcategory. Heck, I wonder if SRL qualifies. That Julian Crouch and Saskia Lane piece is lovely. I just last night put another Julian Crouch piece in an upcoming post about robotics. Zac is gradually returning to normal. Me, I’ve still never gotten the C, even though Yury who I live with has had it twice. My immune system must be Guinness Book of World Records worthy or something. I hope you’re feeling tip-top. ** Sypha, Thanks, I think he is. I know a bunch of people here who have or just had the C who were vaccinated and boostered up the wazoo. Pretend your fancy dress is a secret disguise through which you are surreptitiously studying the fancy pants. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I am scared of heights, how did you guess, ha ha. No problem with roller coasters and stuff because they move so fast, but things that keep you up there and make you think about falling as part of their entertainment aspect are things I avoid no matter what. Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops, nice. Honestly, my favorite cereal isn’t very colourful: Grape Nuts. But I used to really, really like Captain Crunch. And Fruit Loops. And this other cereal that tasted like graham crackers, but I can’t remember what it was called. Oh, that’s why my coffee cup suddenly jumped off my desk and started acting like a freak. Ha ha, fun! Fun loving love forever! Love putting price tags on every item in every house and apartment in the world and a cash register by their front doors and opening them as thrift stores for 24 hours starting at 7 am tomorrow morning, G. ** Rye Anne, Hi. I don’t know too many white British twinks, but I can imagine. New song! Okay! I’ll listen up in total privacy as soon as I can. Thank you for the confidentiality. I toast you! xo. ** Steve Erickson, Hopefully not, yes, ‘cos we have a shit-ton to do, thank you. I, of course, don’t know what Decent Sampler is, but the name gives one some degree of confidence. Wow, 90, that’s a benchmark. I hope his birthday is of the exact sort that he wishes it to be. ** rafe, Hi, Rafe. Cool, happy it intrigued you. Me too, obvs. If only 85% of most theater didn’t make me slip out the exit after 20 minutes. I have seen that Burton thing, yeah. Terrif! What the hell happened to him. Thanks, pal! ** Okay. Here’s a formerly longlost post by a longlost d.l. that forms an intro and paean to the great Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo. Have you read him? I recommend you oughta do that if you haven’t. See you tomorrow.
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