From Publishers Weekly
In this rarefied experimental novel, Spanish novelist Goytisolo ( The Virtues of the Solitary Bird ) attempts to penetrate the 40-day waiting period between death and eternity when, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders still sheathed in a fragile, dreamlike body. The nameless narrator, a writer based in Paris (as is Goytisolo), learns of a friend's sudden death and joins her in the shadowy afterworld by dint of a leap of consciousness. Together and separately, they have chance encounters with celestial nomads who judge the dead. The friend meets the shade of Ibn Arabi, a 13th-century Sufi mystic whose portrayal of the afterlife influenced Dante's Divine Comedy. News of contemporary events, including the Persian Gulf war, filters through to them and mingles with other searing images of carnage and brutality. Besides injecting an eloquent antiwar message, Goytisolo draws parallels between the soul's journey in the next world and the act of writing, which to him involves "abolishing the frontiers between reality and dream." Bush, who translated Goytisolo's memoirs, deftly conveys the lyrical, complex, rhapsodic style used here to evoke spiritual transcendence.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Goytisolo, whose title refers to the Islamic tradition of wandering for 40 days between death and eternity, follows a recently deceased female friend who is also a novelist. It also symbolizes the isolation of the novelist at work as he multiplies levels of interpretation in order to "destabilize" the reader. As records all sorts of surrealistic events, news reports are blaring surrealistic accounts of the 40-day ordeal of Desert Storm. Bombs dropped on Baghdad and Basra are linked in the author's mind to bombs dropped on Barcelona, one of which felled Goytisolo's mother. Committed to plumbing both the human condition and the process of literary creation, the scholarly narrator ponders the alleged relationship between ibn Arabi's Book of the Descent of the Prophet and Dante's Inferno and even questions the relevance of Dante's vengeful Gehenna in today's world of enlightened humane values. A challenging work by one of the giants of Spanish literature.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
