Juan the Landless (Masks) [Paperback]

Juan Goytisolo (Author), Helen Lane (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1991 | Series: Masks

This final volume of Goytisolo's trilogy, written in the year of Franco's death, reveals his sentiments on his exile from Spain.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This reworked and streamlined version of Goytisolo's 1975 novel spins the reader through an angry, prickly catalogue of Spanish colonialism and slavery. Goytisolo writes in wildly run-on sentences (colons are heavily used), offering an exhaustive litany of evils, beginning with a Cuban sugar plantation where little Adelaida plays the violin and an inspired young Master Jorge melodramatically thuds the ivories... the little mulatto absorbed in his cameo role as a cherub tirelessly fends off flies. Gradually it becomes clear that the you addressed here is a descendant of the slaves of this sugar plantation. In exile from the despised mother country, you searches for refuge in a teeming world, traveling from North African souks to Manhattan, where, inspired by King Kong's grandiose majesty, you now sing of the abominable, the aberrant, and the illicit. The narrative ruptures into parodies of medieval Latinate and segues into a blistering attack on authoritarianism and the cult of personality (read: Franco). In the end, transformation is only achieved through the derangement of language: hats off to Bush for a striking translation. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

A spirit of rebellion, directed primarily against Spain and Catholicism but also against respectability and conformity in any of its guises, rules this difficult novel. The difficulty is part of the rebellion: Goytisolo is so outraged at the smug middle-class couple taken for the social norm ("this stinking couple") that he turns his back on the norms of writing, both in content (he dwells lingeringly on defecation, bestiality, and other conventional taboos) and in form (he lets his sentences run on for pages, almost daring the reader to follow him). HIS unbridled imagination roams from Cuba to New York to Spain to North Africa, filled with poetry and loathing - often the poetry of loathing. When he slips into stretches of incantatory prose he may lose some of his Anglo-Saxon readers - that sort of thing goes down better among Latins - but his nose-thumbing wit is often splendidly cheeky. And the preoccupation with the act of writing (very much a present-day concern of experimental writers) is handled rather well. Probably only those committed to understanding the avant-garde literature of today will accept Goytisolo's challenge, and they must be knowledgeable about some of the more arcane aspects of Marxism and Spanish Catholicism to do full justice to the work, the final novel in a trilogy that includes Masks of Identity and Count Julian.—Kirkus Reviews

"Undoubtedly the greatest living Spanish novelist." --Carlos Fuentes

"It is natural that Goytisolo should immediately bring Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Beckett, and even Nabokov to mind."—V. S. Pritchett

"Juan Goytisolo is the best living Spanish novelist." --Times Literary Supplement

"An original and significant force in contemporary literature." --Newsday --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail; Translated By Helen R. Lane edition (January 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852421924
• ISBN-13: 978-1852421922
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,855,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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