Juan Goytisolo (1931–2017)

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 show more 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. show less

Originally published in Buenos Aires in 1960, this short story collection didn't appear in Spain until after the death of Franco: Goytisolo put his fingers on rather too many of the sore points of the nationalist state for it to get past the censors. You just have to look at the opening story "Cara y cruz" to see why: two young men go out for a jolly evening in Barcelona, only to find that the police have swept the streets clean in preparation for a prestigious Catholic conference in the show more city. The ladies of the night have all been bussed out to Gerona, it turns out, so they set off in pursuit and find that it is indeed party time in that normally quiet town, with hundreds of displaced prostitutes all looking for work...

The seven short stories and one longer piece are all drawn from Goytisolo's experiences in Spain in the late fifties, as a student in Barcelona, doing military service, and travelling in the South with a companion presumably based on Monique Lange ("El viaje"). There's a lot of material that appears here as fiction but was re-used in a slightly different form twenty years later in the author's memoirs. In particular, the story "Otoño, en el puerto, cuando llovizina", describing the narrator's waterfront idyll with a fisherman called Raimundo, comes back pretty much in the same words in Forbidden territory.

The content of the final, longer piece, "Aqui abajo", doesn't come back in the memoirs. It describes the experiences of a university graduate doing military service in an obscure garrison town where there is essentially nothing for the army to do, and an awful lot of officers and men pretending to be doing something useful for the glory of Spain. In the narrator's case, his work mostly involves pointlessly copying lists of names from one ledger to another for a couple of hours a day. Goytisolo makes a point of telling us about the excessive drinking and whoring of the officers, about the (grass-) widows on the prowl for young men, and about the disgraceful poverty and illiteracy of the young recruits from Andalucia, all of whom are determined to do whatever it might take to avoid ever having to go back to their villages.

Interesting to see Goytisolo before he went all experimental, writing what is essentially social-realist fiction. show less

Forbidden territory describes Goytisolo's childhood and student years in Barcelona, growing up in a conservative, bourgeois family during the civil war, and trying to flex his intellectual muscles as a young anti-establishment writer in the repressive climate of Franco's Spain in the early fifties.

There are effectively two complementary narratives going on. Most of the book is written as a conventionally-objective, linear first-person story that takes us through key moments like his show more mother's death in an air-raid when Juan was six; his father's exaggerated homophobia; the not-quite-sexual idyll with the fisherman Raimundo in a remote floating bar in the docks; visiting brothels with a bunch of drunken Colombians during a stay in Madrid; the first visits to Paris and his first meeting in the Gallimard office with publisher and writer Monique Lange, who would become his life-partner. But that's set against italicised chapters in which the Goytisolo of the 1980s addresses his younger self critically in the second person, in a more fluid, novelistic stream-of-consciousness style, undermining the pretence that everything is a controlled, well organised career progression. show less

Realms of strife takes up the story in 1957, when Goytisolo is living in Paris with Monique. She has pulled him right into the centre of Paris intellectual life, rubbing shoulders with Sartre and de Beauvoir, Genet, and all the rest, and he's soon established, intoxicatingly, as the young anti-Franco intellectual-of-reference of the Left Bank. His early books are being translated into every possible language, and he's involved in protest actions and never out of the papers, in particular show more marshalling other writers to help get his brother Luis — also a writer — out of jail in Spain. He's soon invited to Cuba to meet the exciting new revolutionaries there, and he's organising a new Paris-based literary review to nurture the Latin American "Boom".

This all starts to come unstuck soon enough, of course: disenchantment sets in when communist friends are disciplined by the Party after Goytisolo criticises its policy on Spain, and worsens when some prominent writers on the left refuse to support protests against Castro's arrest of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. And then there's Algeria and Prague...

Moreover, things aren't going quite straightforwardly in his attempts at playing house with Monique and her daughter: an affair with a Moroccan building worker makes it clear to Goytisolo where his real sexual interests have always been, and a certain amount of painful renegotiation of the relationship is needed. They get through it and stay together — demonstrating once again that you can never put other people into neat categories — but in future there has to be space for Goytisolo to take off on his own to North Africa from time to time, to write and pick up men. And, of course, it is this "coming-out" exercise that also gives Goytisolo the motivation and breathing-space to relaunch his writing, shifting to more experimental books like Señas de identidad and Conde Julian.

There's a lot going on here for such a relatively short memoir: travel in Cuba, Spain, Russia and Africa; a positive shower of high-powered literary names; politics, poetry and intensely personal self-exploration; and quite a bit of unexpected comedy too. And Goytisolo complicates the narrative structure quite a bit, too, playing with the time sequence and adding third-person passages to the interplay of first and second we had in the first volume. Good stuff, well worth reading more than once. show less