In Makbara, Juan Goytisoloâ€”widely considered Spain's greatest living writerâ€”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."

Makbara

Goytisolo, Juan

Seaver Books

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.The narrator identifies himself with the real Count 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.

Count Julian (A Viking compass book)

Penguin??Books

Juan the Landless

Literature & Fiction

VIKING

Forbidden Territory

Biographies & Memoirs

Northpoint Press

Saracen chronicles: A selection of literary essays

Essays & Correspondence

Quartet Books

Quarantine

Quarantine, a novel by one of Spain's most provocative writers, recounts the forty days in which, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders between death and eternity, still in possession of a tenuous, dreamlike body. After the unexpected death of a friend, the narratora writer like Goytisolofollows her in his imagination into this otherworld where all kinds of implausible (or are they?) things occur. 
Meanwhile, television and radio report the 40-day war in the Persian Gulf, and images of war's destruction mingle with the narrator's vivid imagination of the torments of the underworld. Simultaneously, the narrator is writing the novel we are reading, for writing itself is a kind of quarantine where the writer withdraws from the world to wander in the otherworld of the imagination. 
Quarantine is thus both an exploration of the human condition and an investigation of the writing process. It celebrates friendship and denounces war with equal force, and despite the grim themes is filled with humor, shocking surprises, playful language, and love.

Peter Bush (transl.)

Literary

Quartet

Landscapes After the Battle

Traces the life of the great Spanish writer from his difficult childhood during the Spanish Civil War, through his adolescence to his exile in the international literary circles of Paris

The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo: Forbidden Territory and Realms of Stife

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

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 Reviews
Juan 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.

The Marx Family Saga

United States

City Lights Publishers

Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya is an incisive 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 rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage of life in four explosive war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the 17th century to the Gulf War, the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political and cultural confrontation.
Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria and the war waged by French police against North African migrants in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the Caucasus. Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the break up of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal of fundamentalisms—Islamic, Jewish and Russian Orthodox—Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary figures of our time.
Many of these succinct and eloquent essays first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El Pais, and English translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement (London).
Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife; the trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless; and the essays, Saracen Chronicles. Other works by him and published by City Lights Publishers include The Marx Family Saga, published in 1999, and A Cock-Eyed Comedy, published in 2005.
Peter Bush is Director of the British Center for Literary Translation and translated Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga, which was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan.

Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya

History

Africa

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