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| Juan Goytisolo Photo by Ricardo Gutiérrez |
A tribute to Juan Goytisolo
by PETER BUSH
The death of the Catalan-born writer Juan Goytisolo on June 4 at his home in Marrakesh marks the end of an era in Spanish intellectual and literary life. Though he went into exile in 1956 and never lived in his native country again, Goytisolo was Spain’s pre-eminent contemporary novelist and political essayist. After Níjar Country (1954), his account of the mixture of human misery and natural beauty he’d encountered in Andalusia, he decided he could not continue to write in Spain “with a censor in his head”. In Paris he soon rejected the role of the lionized young anti-Francoist rebel and embarked on a less public kind of life under the influence of Monique Lange (later his wife) and Jean Genet, his moral mentor.
