Goytisolo

Photo: Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello

Via 3 Quarks Daily comes this link to this article on the eminent Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo. Goytisolo, I'm extremely proud to say, is a contributor to my forthcoming edited volume On Torture (2007) up next after the book on Pragmatism and Globalization due out this summer or early fall.

If you don't know Goytisolo's work, read him. I recommend, as an introduction, State of Siege. If you like him, read his autobiographical work Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife. The "greatest living Spanish novelist," they always say. Goytisolo has lived off and on in Marrakech for 50-some years and has a fascinating insight into North African Muslim culture. If you want to know more about the latter, check out his nonfiction essays in Cinema Eden.

Here are some choice bits from the NY Times article, which is not great, but at least it exists.

What is remarkable about Goytisolo is the shrewdness of his long-term political judgment. On the ideological causes that tripped up so many of his generation, Goytisolo has consistently come down on what turned out to be the right side. Although he was an initial enthusiast for revolutionary movements in Cuba, Indochina and Algeria, Goytisolo was quick to point out how freedom-loving guerrillas, once in power, tended to morph into dictators backed by an omnipresent secret police. In the 60's, he was one of the first writers on the left to acknowledge that Fidel Castro had turned (as he wrote) "that ex-paradise of a Caribbean island. . .into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp." During the same period, he was accused of treachery by his comrades in the anti-Franco resistance for publishing an essay in the French newsweekly L'Express predicting, regretfully, that Spain was going to be liberated from Franco not by left-wing revolution but by the market forces that were "normalizing" the country.

Goytisolo's upbringing in a Spain ruled by what was known as nacionalcatolicismo has made him especially allergic to the mingling of state and religion. "I am against all fundamentalisms," he told me. He loves the popular Islamic traditions of North Africa and Turkey, the rich cultural and religious heritage of Arab civilization, but is repelled by the puritanical strains of political Islam that are displacing them. "The Muslim world needs to do an autocriticism, to take what's good from other cultures, prepare the way for social and economic change and not merely recall the extinct glories of Al Andalus." (Al Andalus is the Arab term for Spain under Moorish rule, which has been evoked as a golden age not just by writers and scholars but also with chilling irredentism by Islamist terror groups.) In 2004, when the French government banned the wearing of head scarves in public schools, many European leftists and libertarians took to the streets alongside Muslims in protest. Goytisolo, however, backed the ban, on the grounds that religion belongs strictly at home...

Until Franco's death, Goytisolo's novels, composed in a stream of consciousness that is linguistically daredevil, learned and often startlingly scatological, were banned in Spain. Spanish readers had to smuggle in editions published in Mexico and Argentina. For decades, Goytisolo tells me ruefully, "my name was more popular in police stations than bookshops, and I do not mean to compliment the literary awareness of Spanish policemen."

..."You should ask for utopia. You need a little utopianism in the rough cynicism of contemporary politics."