The Virtues of the Solitary Bird [Paperback]

The solitary bird of Spanish writer Goytisolo's novel is a figure of many identities, all belonging to individuals in some way dispossessed. In a feminine guise, the solitary bird suffers from a disease that leaves her not only "emaciated, covered with buboes," but persecuted, imprisoned "in her hermetic cell" so she cannot contaminate others. St. John of the Cross, the Spanish poet and mystic, also figures as the solitary bird. Writing of "the intoxication and joyful consummation" of the soul with God, he was singled out by an "all-powerful ecclesiastical machinery" that would not tolerate his personal, sensual spirituality. Finally, the figure doubles for Goytisolo himself, self-exiled from Spain for many years. Drawing on these scraps of personae, Goytisolo ( Juan the Landless ) creates a single voice that resonates broadly. The solitary bird's nightmarish account of pursuit by gangs "wearing rubber gloves and gauze masks" is the AIDS victim's experience of society's paranoia. It is also the story of the independent thinker throughout history, flushed out by those fearful of "contaminating ideas." Goytisolo finds in those attributes that set the solitary bird apart--which are to him virtues--an aesthetic from which he derives a fiery, mercurial style. From St. John's poem "The Spiritual Canticle," Goytisolo adopts "his tense, fragmented turns of phrase . . . his insular and ecstatic spaces . . . fluctuating between the freedom and the gloom of his spiritual night." As fiercely dedicated to imaginative freedom as Goytisolo is in this uncompromising, difficult novel--expertly rendered into English--his moments of greatest power and poignancy come when he descends into the solitary bird's dark night of the soul. Considering the source of her illness, she asks: "might not the Beloved from whose wine cellar we drank and whom we abandoned satiated with his delightful knowledge be the instrument chosen by destiny to annihilate us?" Does the solitary bird die, like St. John, for having loved God or does she die, like contemporary men and women stricken with AIDS, for human love? Goytisolo does not answer, but offers this novel, a by turns wrenching and ecstatic song of "the solitude of wounded love."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Goytisolo here challenges the reader to partake of a cerebral, esoteric literary experiment. The protean narrator, who is hospitalized, doubles as a visionary female and as the 16th-century mystic St. John of the Cross, whose persecution is stunningly paralleled to the narrator's condition (ostensibly AIDS). The unconventional punctuation, lyrical modulation, ambiguous and often obscure expression, and demanding reader participation compound the intertextual framework of the piece. Lane, translator of four other major Goytisolo novels, capably renders this 1988 work into English, adding a welcome contribution to the growing corpus in English of one of Spain's leading writers. Highly recommended.
- Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

a novel, Spain, tr Helen Lane