Count Julian of Ceuta is supposed to have been a 7th century Christian Visigothic ruler who facilitated the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by forming an alliance with the Muslim invaders, and has thus established himself in Spanish tradition as a notorious betrayer. As Goytisolo wryly notes, recent historians seem to be in broad agreement that, assuming he ever existed, he probably had another name, didn't live in those times, and didn't necessarily betray anyone. But, all the same, Goytisolo, a left-wing, gay, Spanish writer, living in political exile in Tangier and frequently attacked in the Franco press for his "treacherous" and "unpatriotic" ideas, feels an affinity with Julian, and in this novel he develops his fantasy of a reconquest of Spain by the Moors, which will sweep away the hypocritical ideas of Spanishness cultivated by Franco and the Catholic hierarchy.

Goytisolo's point, of course, is that it's absurd to speak of any kind of set of ideas, genes, or physical or moral characteristics that make up the "Spanish character". Even the famous "Olé" of the bullfight is an Arabic borrowing ("wa-l-lah"). You can be Spanish without being a stoical, Catholic Francoist, but you can't be Spanish without owing a great deal to the Moorish part of Spanish history.

It's a complicated book, full of — amongst many other things — linguistic games; multi-level parodies of texts from the Golden Age, the Generación del 98, and the Franco era; grotesque or sordid sex-scenes; an idiosyncratic rebellion against the tyranny of "full-stop-capital-letter"; snakes that are never just snakes; the uncensored version of Red Riding Hood; a James Bond film; a certain part of Isabella the Catholic that has become a giant tourist attraction; and, as a recurrent theme, the topography of Tangier, with a special focus on its public toilets and bath-houses. There are lots of pages that you need to read and re-read to make sense of them (I was grateful for Prof. Levine's notes in the edition I was using), but you can't say that it ever gets boring! Wonderfully caustic and original. ( )

I wasn't all that keen on Marks of Identity, the first of Goytisolo's trilogy. It had a couple of memorable scenes, but otherwise seemed to be difficult for the sake of difficulty. Luckily, CJ is substantially shorter, so I was willing to give it a chance; and I just read Gibbon's paragraph on the original Count Julian, which reminded me of this book.

And I'm glad it did. I only wish I knew i) Spanish and ii) much more about Spanish literary history, because I suspect there's a lot going on here that I only get in a very vague way. Count Julian is a semi-mythical character who sold 'Spain' out to the invading Islamic armies in the middle ages; Goytisolo imagines himself as a Count Julian figure, who, in the words of de Sade, would perpetrate a crime so horrific that his very existence "would become the cause of some sort of disorder," and so mammoth in scale that "the effect of it would be prolonged far beyond my own lifetime." Like, you know, selling out Spain to the Muslims.

CJ the book is a description of a few such hypothetical crimes, mixed in with some extraordinary invective against Spain and the Spanish, particularly the myths of Spain (at one point they're collapsed into the dung of a famous species of Iberian goat), and most importantly, the fascist government of the late twentieth century. It's hard to tell, but it seems that most of these crimes are kind of day-dream hallucinations, though the first crime--crushing bugs in the books of great Spanish authors--is really the frame for the rest of the book. I won't repeat the content of the crimes, because, frankly, they're genuinely horrifying.

As much as I enjoy expressions of sheer disgust about speleologists, this book is even better than that. First--though my ignorance of Spanish holds me back--Goytisolo is clearly out to deform the Spanish language as much as possible, since it was taken as a symbol of Spanishness during the period. He tries, in effect, to write beautifully in an intentionally bad way, which sounds unpleasant, and occasionally is. Second, what could be a simple rant is structured around a number of recurring images and incidents, clearly inspired by musical composition. It works very well, better here than in, e.g., Javier Marias, though it works fairly well for him too. Finally, Goytisolo gets a surprising amount of content from the idea of looking: Julian stands in North Africa, looking across the straits at Spain every morning, just as a spectator stares at a snake.

So, in short, this book is linguistically challenging, symbolically rich, astonishingly well-structured, intellectually sound, and more than a little grotesque. Count Julian is an incredible character, and the ending of the book left me shaken. Not for everyone. Contemporary Anglophone readers will certainly freak out about its treatment of women (forgetting, in the process, that an assault on a woman who is symbolizing a country is at the same time an assault on the mythology of Motherlands and the use of the patria's 'femininity' in the interests of militarism and oppression). But a masterpiece nonetheless. ( )

http://www.galaxiagutenberg.com/Contenido/Libros/libro.asp?Codigo=14115&nav3... ( )