Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo - Softcover

Goytisolo, Juan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185984555X ISBN 13: 9781859845554

Publisher: Verso, 2003

Synopsis

For forty-five years, the expatriate Juan Goytisolo has been widely acknowledged as both Spain’s greatest living writer and its most scabrous critic. In some thirty books of fiction, autobiography, essays and journalism, he has turned the Spanish language against what he derides as ‘Sunnyspain’, flaying the ‘Hispanos’ while excavating their culture’s Moorish and Jewish roots.

This, his masterful two-volume autobiography first published in the mid-1980s, broke new ground in Spanish letters with its introspective sexual and emotional honesty. It charts the writer’s unique journey from a Barcelona childhood violently disrupted by the Spanish civil war to student rebellion against the Francoist dictatorship and exile as a ‘self-banished Spaniard’ to Paris in 1956.

In Paris, Goytisolo fell in love with Monique Lange, befriended Jean Genet, and discovered his own homosexuality as he supported the struggles for Algerian independence. His passionate, iconoclastic pen spares no one, least of all himself, in this striking portrayal of politics and sexuality in twentieth-century France and Spain.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in 1931, Juan Goytisolo went into voluntary exile in 1956 and has never returned to live in Spain. A bitter opponent of the Franco regime, his early novels were banned in his native country. He divided his time between Paris and Marrakesh until the death of his wife, Monique Lange, at which time he moved permanently to Marrakesh.

Peter Bush has translated nine books by Juan Goytisolo, including Exiled from Almost Everywhere and Juan the Landless, as well as novels by other prominent Spanish and Latin American writers.

From Publishers Weekly:

In exile since the Franco regime vilified him for his frank mixture of leftist and bisexual politics, Goytisolo (The Garden of Secrets) is a Spanish writer who left for Paris in 1956. His books, some 30 of them by now, are rife with historical metafiction, plays on his literary status and denunciations of Spain's colonizing past. This beautifully written memoir, first published in Spanish as two volumes in the 1980s, covers the first 30 or so years of Goytisolo's turbulent, cafe-centered life, stretching from the Barcelona of Fascist bombardments during the Spanish civil war to the '60s, encountering cultural heroes like Genet, Che, Castro and Cort zar along the way. Under a hail of Franco's bombs, Juan and his brother Luis, also a writer, plunge into literary activity, reveling in the contradiction that only censorious regimes, it seems, truly value literature. From then on it's all Faulkner, illicit sex and a French girlfriend. Lucking into a Parisian fashion for peninsular writers in the '50s, Goytisolo is published by Gallimard and starts hanging out on the Left Bank. This is literary history up close: from Genet's drug of choice (Nembutal) to Raymond Queneau's housekeeper or running a literary magazine (Libre) in what later became a couscous shop. Mixed in with the usual Euro-scribe's predilection for petitions and fellow-traveling are Goytisolo's adventures in what he calls the "Sotadic zone," or the world of macho Arabs who swing both ways. But style is king here, and it is wonderful, infiltrating Goytisolo's chronological narrative like one of his own characters.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 185984555X
• ISBN 13: 9781859845554
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320