Items related to The Garden of Secrets
Synopsis
Over three weeks twenty-eight story-tellers - one for each letter in the Arabic alphabet - meet in a Marrakesh garden to tell the story of a poet, Eusebio, arrested in Melilla in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Eusebio, a friend of Garcia Lorca and his Circle, escapes assassination and his life then escapes the control of a single destiny. Some tales embroider his shadowy life with stories from Djemaa-el-Fna - the pasha's cook, the slave-market, Aysha and the stork... Does Eusebio betray his Fascist friends by confessing in a show-trial that they indulged in orgies with the youngsters from their battallions? Does he transform into Eugenio the world war two black marketeer from Tangiers? Or does he transmute into the world of Alphonse van Worden, doyen of Marrakesh queens with his Rolls, Indian chauffeur and home showings of Mary Pickford movies? In The Garden of Secrets, Juan Goytisolo tells a moving story as he reflects on memory, history and the mythical power of fiction.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
Juan Goytisolo has been hailed as one of the finest writers currently working in the Spanish language. He has produced a series of passionately iconoclastic and obliquely autobiographical novels, charting the effects of civil war and fascist dictatorship upon his native Spain. In The Garden of Secrets, a Circle of 28 readers, each one represented by a letter of the Arabic alphabet, gather in a garden to tell the story of Eusebio, a dissident poet arrested by the Falange in the early years of the Spanish Civil War. Diagnosed as a victim of "collectivist social utopias" exacerbated by "feminoid urges", the poet is subjected to a brutal programme of drugs, re-indoctrination and electric shock treatment. The narrative which follows is disorientating, nightmarish and fragmentarily beautiful. At the heart of the narrative, a fabric that constantly unravels itself with each successive storyteller, is the enigma of the poet himself. Who is Eusebio? The Islamic convert and ascetic divine of Marrakesh, the bloated black marketeer of Tangiers or a sham aristocrat with a passion for Mary Pickford and a penchant for female impersonation? These myriad identities, constructed by the various narrators (including a brilliant parody of the Arabist scholar), shroud the subject in mystery whilst illuminating the real object of Goytisolo's interest: the process of storytelling itself. After all, the author is yet another "fictitious character, a mere paper being like the one you're laboriously constructing". The Garden of Secrets is a brilliant, mesmerising novel. --Jerry Brotton
Review
This work deserves the highest recognition ... no-one can deny Juan Goytisolo is the main Spanish novelist on active service (Carlos Fuentes)
A beautifully written metaphor for what it means to seek out the truth in a world often dominated by lies. The Garden of Secrets reminds us that this author, now 70 years of age, is one of the most brilliant of living writers (LA Times)
Goytisolo's extraordinary lyrical and imaginative gifts are simultaneously forceful and beguiling, and the only response is to give in to the tumultuous, hallucinatory voices (Observer)
Goytisolo writes like no-one else except maybe Genet; with rigour, anguish, the blackest humour - and a keen eye for masculine (preferably uniformed) beauty (Gay Times)
Fantastically imaginative and intensely moral (Scotsman)
The best thing since sliced tortilla (The Times)
Spain's greatest iconoclast smashes the mirror of narrative, magically reassembles it and teleports the reader into a looking-glass world (Mary Flanagan)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSerpent's Tail
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1846688361
- ISBN 13 9781846688362
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages156
- Rating
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