From Amazon.co.uk
Juan Goytisolo has been hailed as one of the finest writers currently working in the Spanish language. He has produced a series of passionately iconoclastic and obliquely autobiographical novels, charting the effects of civil war and fascist dictatorship upon his native Spain. In
The Garden of Secrets, a Circle of 28 readers, each one represented by a letter of the Arabic alphabet, gather in a garden to tell the story of Eusebio, a dissident poet arrested by the Falange in the early years of the Spanish Civil War. Diagnosed as a victim of "collectivist social utopias" exacerbated by "feminoid urges", the poet is subjected to a brutal programme of drugs, re-indoctrination and electric shock treatment. The narrative which follows is disorientating, nightmarish and fragmentarily beautiful. At the heart of the narrative, a fabric that constantly unravels itself with each successive storyteller, is the enigma of the poet himself. Who is Eusebio? The Islamic convert and ascetic divine of Marrakesh, the bloated black marketeer of Tangiers or a sham aristocrat with a passion for Mary Pickford and a penchant for female impersonation? These myriad identities, constructed by the various narrators (including a brilliant parody of the Arabist scholar), shroud the subject in mystery whilst illuminating the real object of Goytisolo's interest: the process of storytelling itself. After all, the author is yet another "fictitious character, a mere paper being like the one you're laboriously constructing".
The Garden of Secrets is a brilliant, mesmerising novel. --
Jerry Brotton
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The life of Eusebio, a homosexual dissident poet who was a contemporary of Lorca, is the subject of this collection of interrelated short narratives, a tour-de-force in its range of styles and perspectives. When members of a reading group decide to compose a collaborative work on the events leading up to and following the poet's internment in a nightmarish state psychiatric hospital during the 1930s, their collage of stories results in an image of the writer as an eccentric, somewhat haunted and brilliant individual. Some of the stories attempt to reimagine Eusebio's life with journalistic accuracy. One describes his tiny hospital room, from which, until he escapes, he is able to catch only a small glimpse of the outside world; another chronicles his slippery responses to courtroom questioning, making his prevarications into acts of rebellion. The book is more entertaining when it goes farther afield than this, making suppositions about the poet's life that could not possibly be true but are fascinating possibilities. One simply stated tale concerns a man who transforms himself into a stork to spy on his adulterous wife; later, it is revealed that Eusebio transcribed the story from one told by a neighbor in the town where he spent his last days. Another storyteller fashions Eusebio into an impostor who names himself after a character in the cult novel The Saragossa Manuscript; this Eusebio dresses in drag, watches movies at all hours and rides in a chauffeured limousine. One only wishes that Goytisolo, author of numerous novels that blend a strong imagination with a stronger social conscience, had pursued some of his more whimsical impulses further. Still, the resulting work is a monument to ideological and intellectual integrity. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
