Surreal fiction from Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s greatest living writer. A resurrected Karl and Jenny Marx sitting on their sofa in Hampstead watching a television documentary about the landing of Albanian refugees 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. built 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. Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLenin T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hampstead 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 from UCLA, an anarchist from the Spanish Civil Bar, Bakunin . . . But the narrator’s publisher, the urbane pipe-smoking Mr. Faulkner, wants a best-selling novel, a proper story with real facts and heart-rending descriptions of the Marx ménage. Some hope!
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Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
The Marx Family Saga ($10.95 paperback original; April 2; 186 pp.; 0-87286-349-2): History is a nightmare that's more enjoyable than most pleasant dreams in this truculent surrealistic farrago from the Spanish postmodernist author of such cryptic fictions as Count Julian (1974) and Quarantine (1994). The subject here is ``the long-winded author of Capital'' and his long-suffering family, reimagined into such situations as a TV serial translating their struggles into cheesy melodrama, Marx's conversation with the (highly indignant) biblical patriarch Abraham, and damning testimony on the failure of his ideals from ``the survivors and victims of real socialism.'' By turns playful, vitriolic, hilarious and numbingly redundant, this is, oddly enough, one of Goytisolo's least labyrinthine and most entertaining books. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Juan Goytisolo is "the most important living novelist from Spain," -- S.F. Guardian
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5.0 out of 5 stars
the perfect gift for the former fellow traveller,
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This review is from: The Marx Family Saga (Paperback)
after the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, Spain's greatest novelist sat down and wrote his greatest novel.
Juan Goytisolo left Spain in 1956 in opposition to the regime of Generalissimo Franco, guaranteeing the banning of nearly all his works in his native land. "For decades, my name was more popular in police stations than bookshops, and I do not mean to compliment the literary awareness of Spanish policemen." in Count Julian, reflecting a somewhat angry exile in Tangier, Goytisolo becomes the angry Moor once again defeating Catholic Spain, crushing beneath the hooves of his invading hoards everything that has been falsified in Spain, especially its berber heritage. now, alone of his generation ! , standing, looking, as the statues fall across the eastern expanses of europe, trying to understand what the end of marxism really signifies. this second Moor, who has raised the specter of revolution in all the capitals of Europe, works each day at the Brit library on his books, wife Jenny (nee Baroness) faithfully transcribing them. what must this later Moor feel and think, watching the statues topple, the whole marxist enterprise liquidated and sold at auction? accepting faithfully his investigation, our author visits the Marxs at their various abodes in London. he visits Bakunin for his take. meanwhile, this ragtag spanish anarchist or that displaced russian proletarian stops by the Marx house, the offices of our author's publisher or the set of the TV mocumentary being simultaneously filmed on the Marxs, just to help our author understand. did Marx grease Stalin's skids? did history pass him by in 1872 without telling him? did the faithful Lenchen have and hide the Moor's baby out of devotion to the family and the cause of the world revolution? these City Lights productions of Juan Goytisolo's novels are nicely done. I have their edition of A Cock-Eyed Comedy, Goytisolo's whimsical look at the "one-syllable monster," the Spanish Church and the tearooms of Paris. yum! anyone who has ever loved or loathed Marxism should have a chuckle with this book, for which the author most assuredly deserves a much-delayed Nobel Prize.
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