Monday, June 12, 2017

Juan Goytisolo / Exiled From Almost Everywhere / Review

Exiled From Almost Everywhere by Juan Goytisolo – review

This Spanish romp in cyberspace is both profound and serious

Alberto Manguel
Sunday 15 May 2011 05.30 BST

mong the many Spanish masterpieces that mysteriously never found an audience among English-speaking readers is a 16th-century novel, written entirely in dialogue in a mixture of Andalusian dialect and bawdy Italianised Spanish, by a Jewish convert, Francisco Delgado – later known as Delicado when he settled in Italy after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Published in Venice in 1528, La lozana andaluza (The Lusty Andalusian) is the rags-to-riches story of a young woman from Cordoba who, after a series of amorous adventures, escapes to Rome and sets up an enormously successful prostitution business that enables her to retire, rich and celebrated.

The Spanish critic Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, in his classical survey of Spanish literature, pronounced the book irredeemably obscene, and rejoiced in the fact that it had not produced any offspring. He was very much mistaken. Juan Goytisolo, one of the outstanding novelists of our time, and now on the shortlist for the Man Booker International prize, declared that he drew his inspiration directly from La lozana andaluza to create a series of fiercely satirical novels that echo Delicado's unforgiving wit and vigour.

In Exiled From Almost Everywhere, the Monster of Le Sentier, a Parisian pervert with a talent for social criticism, featured in previous novels by Goytisolo, has become the victim of a terrorist attack and finds himself in an afterlife that is a cross between a video arcade and an internet café "the size of an Olympic stadium". Here, in this cyberspace of the dead, the Monster finds that his memory has been replaced by an electronic one, and that he can correspond with other invisible souls who send him insulting or challenging emails, ads for laundering money and for terrorist weapons (such as an erogenous bomb that will kill through excess of sexual activity), and little notes that will lead him on a secret mission – one that will remain unexplained and unaccomplished.

The inhabitants of this otherworldly cyberspace are mostly religious leaders: a Rastafarian rabbi with plans for reforming the political arena, a monsignor who takes Christ's injunction to "suffer the little children to come unto me" too literally, and a radical female imam known as "Alice", who incites the Monster to participate in a bombing campaign. The name of the imam is not arbitrary: cyberspace is Goytisolo's version of Wonderland, where sanity consists in the recognition that everyone (including oneself) is in some profound way inescapably mad.

Blending Delicado's erotic 16th-century underworld with that other underworld of Alice's mad creatures, Goytisolo creates a nightmarish but coherent universe, in which nothing is what it seems. The insane goings-on of contemporary politics and religion become, in the Monster's afterlife, the natural and accepted course of events: "In order to rebuild, destruction is indispensable. To clean the air we breathe daily, we must previously have polluted it. To sell ecological products, we must first infect the world with new species of virus and bacteria." Indeed.

Exiled From Almost Everywhere is perhaps the best work of Goytisolo's later period. The author, who in his 20s, wrote realistic novels that described the vulgar horrors of Franco's Spain, from which he was exiled, later began to develop a freer, less traditional, more ironic and humorous voice. Nowhere is this style more accomplished than in this novel, beautifully translated into English by Peter Bush. (Even Bush's title is a clever rendering of the original Spanish, literally "The Exile From Here and There".)

Under the appearance of a wicked romp, Exiled From Almost Everywhere is a profound work that demands close attention from its readers – who, as the author confesses at the end, must remain bewildered by its Wonderland invention. Something has taken place, something has been described that escapes the frame of the story, in which, magically, reader, writer and murky protagonist coalesce. In the final pages, the narrator has realised: "That he had been someone else, a fictional entity whose labours and excursions might relieve and surprise him.

"The truth of the story is held in the words. All that would remain of him would be the dream of a derisory existence. Of a tailless shooting star, sentenced by the world's sound and fury to sudden, silent extinction." To such a realisation, we too are implacably led.

Alberto Manguel's A Reader on Reading is published by Yale.

THE GUARDIAN