From Publishers Weekly
This engaging, gritty satire by Goytisolo, an outstanding Spanish novelist who left during Franco's regime, offers a skewed tour of the tough new Paris street life radiating outward from the neighborhood of the Sentier metro. In 78 rapid-fire vignettes, the hero as "monster" in trench coat and felt hat sets out from his studio on the Rue Poissonniere to indulge in his "maniacal, obsessive, almost canine nosing about." He prowls for little girls. He studies the subway and the movie-house, caves where weird fantasies are played out. He favors pop culture: the waxwork museums over the Louvre and the graffiti that reveal the city's foreign influx. The Sentier quarter is a microcosm of Paris, with its milling, dark-skinned populace of Arabs, Turks and Africans, subject to grueling poverty and police harassment. Around the city hovers the xenophobic spirit of "the commandos of Charles Martel," who centuries ago drove back the Saracen hordes. Everywhere, scraps of history and the classics are snipped and glued into Goytisolo's fresh, absurdist text.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Charlie is as good a name as any for a man bereft of aesthetic sense, a man who prowls Paris, white mouse up his sleeve, enticing little girls toward exciting indiscretions. The Reverend, as he calls himself, is a relativist venturing "into the universe of unlimited modernity on tiptoe almost," and his tale builds from scraps of near-reality (Paris overrun by Moslem hordes) and allusions to greatness (Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, and others). The sum is a novel disintegrating into form: protean Goytisolo. His playful shaping of the novel's sense and the reader's reaction continue in overt and incomparable style. Although the Parisian locale is new to Goytisolo's novels, the speculating character rings consistent, and readers of Count Julian (1974) will relish this latest work. Paul E. Hutchison, English Dept., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
