Goytisolo Juan

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.

Juan Goytisolo's radical revision of his masterpiece Juan the Landless is the starting-point for this new translation by renowned translator Peter Bush. The new text focuses on Goytisolo's surreal exploration and rejection of his own roots, Catholic Spain's repression of Muslims, Jews and gays, his ancestors' exploitation of Cuban slaves and his own forging of a language at once poetic, politic and ironic that celebrates the erotic act of writing and and the anarchic joy of being the ultimate outsider. In Juan the Landless the greatest living novelist from Spain defiantly re-invents tradition and the world as a man without a home, without a country, in praise of pariahs.

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.”

Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count 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.

An exile returns to Spain from France to find that he is repelled by the fascism of Franco's Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In this novel, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country.

In Juan Goytisolo's surreal fiction Karl and Jenny Marx sit on their sofa in Hampstead and watch a television documentary. Albanian refugees land on a private Italian beach flourishing photocopies of dollar bills in search of paradise Dallas. Find out how Karl reacts to the demise of the systems Josef Visionariovitch and Co. build on his word! Read all about the family life of the Marxes, moving upmarket from Dean Street to Highgate and beyond, yet never free of the hock shop!A resurrected Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLenin T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hempstead housewarming reception and ball filmed by the cameras for a Merchant-Ivoryish Red Baroness--which subsequently becomes the subject of a Saturday-night talk-show featuring a feminist sexologist form UCLA, an anarchist form the Spanish Civil Bar, Bakunin . . .But the narrator's publisher, the urbane pipe-smoking Mr. Faulkner, wants a bestselling novel, a proper story with real facts and heart-rending descriptions of the Marx menage. Some hope! Goytisolo returns to the techniques of his youth, sticks in a photo of Helen Demuth, the family servant. Why bother with all that description? Leave that to Balzac. Now was Marx or Engels the father of her child?Juan Goytisolo's text, his most mordant satire yet, is a roller-coaster of bitter incentive and witty paradox, a verbal whip-lashing for the cheerleaders of the new world order."The most important living novelist from Spain." ?Guardian"The Marx Family Saga is a surreal fantasy . . . Witty, clever and entertaining as well as provocative and insightful, The Marx Family Saga is a remarkable achievement."--Danny Yee, Danny ReviewsJuan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. Since 1956 he has lived in voluntary exile outside Spain and now divides his time between Paris and Marrakesh. His novels are The Virtues of the Solitary Bird and Quarantine.