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jonfaith's review
5.0
My wife bought me this. Someone could imagine this an act of sorts, considering the subject. My wife has an eye for literature, what works and what is simply fad. She finally read this when we were coming back from Morocco. The trip was inspired by Goytisolo himself, not that he suggested such. He was simply there, hence we went. I reread this on the short British Airways flight back to London. I was noshing sausages and drinking ale to make up for lost time. This is a mystic work, one which flips our understandings of Sarajevo, inserts and transpalnts the sufferings to our Western idleness and indifference. The narrative is rife with eschatology, it probes into the ancient wisdom of the souk and follows such into the toxic vapors of nationalism.
screen_memory's review
4.0
Another metanarrative following 11 years after Quarantine, this time centered on the Siege of Sarajevo arising during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The narrator of the book's first part, a mysterious J.G. who may or not himself be fictional, dies in an artillery strike on his hotel. The body and his passport both disappear. All that remains behind as a record of his existence is a manuscript which may or not have been doctored; a manuscript of apocryphal writings predicting events that occur during the siege after the alleged and perhaps non-existent author's death, verses celebrating sodomy and defecation, as well as a number of poems whose authorship is similarly doubtful. At no point do we arrive nearer toward any resolution as to the author's identity; each time something edging toward an explanation occurs, some further meddling is discovered, casting the whole affair into increasing degrees of complexity.
The novel doubles as a sort of attack on the West's indifference. The actual blockade lasted roughly four years, and characters in the text often wonder why they have yet to receive the slightest assistance from anyone anywhere. It also muses on the normalcy of tragedy; of the normalization of living as though one were constantly in a sniper's sights (many often were) or would find themselves in the blast radius of an artillery strike; of the awful but simple fact that 'tragedies that go on for too long are boring.' (After all, aren't tragedies, at least while they're shiny and new, a perverse form of entertainment? [Goytisolo I'm sure might have had a few words similar to Baudrillard's regarding the Gulf War]).
I cannot help but think that the explosion of the bomb that took his mother's life in his native Spain has echoed throughout every work across every year until the end of his life. Familiar to Goytisolo's readers are gruesome images of bodies bloodied, bullet-ridden, and blown apart....
I've noticed when victims of the violence are given singular mention (and are not swept over in descriptions of corpses amassed atop countless others), they are often women; perhaps literary projections of the recurrently murdered mother. The last lines of the novel before the appendix of poems describes a woman dead from a bullet in the neck; the novel's final image of the recurrently murdered mother.
The novel doubles as a sort of attack on the West's indifference. The actual blockade lasted roughly four years, and characters in the text often wonder why they have yet to receive the slightest assistance from anyone anywhere. It also muses on the normalcy of tragedy; of the normalization of living as though one were constantly in a sniper's sights (many often were) or would find themselves in the blast radius of an artillery strike; of the awful but simple fact that 'tragedies that go on for too long are boring.' (After all, aren't tragedies, at least while they're shiny and new, a perverse form of entertainment? [Goytisolo I'm sure might have had a few words similar to Baudrillard's regarding the Gulf War]).
I cannot help but think that the explosion of the bomb that took his mother's life in his native Spain has echoed throughout every work across every year until the end of his life. Familiar to Goytisolo's readers are gruesome images of bodies bloodied, bullet-ridden, and blown apart....
I've noticed when victims of the violence are given singular mention (and are not swept over in descriptions of corpses amassed atop countless others), they are often women; perhaps literary projections of the recurrently murdered mother. The last lines of the novel before the appendix of poems describes a woman dead from a bullet in the neck; the novel's final image of the recurrently murdered mother.