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screen_memory 's review for:
Makbara
by Juan Goytisolo
God, I love Goytisolo. There is so much of his language that appeals to the aesthete in me. Whereas Musil's writing blooms with ideas where it is barren in plot (as it was meant to be), Goytisolo's garden is lush with language and imagery. Much of the pleasure of Goytisolo's language lies in its frenetic propulsion & the frantic convulsion of images coruscating in the reader’s mind.
Makbara is far more gentle than the books in his trilogy, having been published 5 years after Juan the Landless which closed the trilogy. Goytisolo compares his language to a snake - sly, sinuous, cunning - although it seems exhausted of its venom here in Makbara, although this is no point of complaint since its readers need not subordinate themselves to Goytisolo's abuse as was the condition for his earlier novels. One need only lose themselves in a sprawling and profusive language.
The serpent of Goytisolo's language slithers not through plot, but through a convulsion of images; this time through images of markets, North African bazaars, American malls, designer clothing, and Moroccan djellabas and kaftans; of bodies - in dress or in flesh - of vaginas, asses, cocks, hands, & eager mouths. These two dissimilar themes are, of course, synthesized; one cruises for commodities, products, and bodies alike as they walk along the streets of the bazaar or the aisles of the supermarket in Goytisolo's N. Africa. Maqbara is Arabic for 'grave', & Goytisolo used Makbara to refer to cemeteries where lovers steal away to be intimate.
The idea that Goytisolo intended Makbara to communicate the idea of sex as freedom is amusing to me since I took all of the passages conflating the market and the body, or commerce and sexuality, to be a more severe commentary on human sexuality, one devoid of intimacy. All of the talk of markets and bodies is not quite a language to liberate or an image to edify - Guyotat, too, writes of North African markets & bodies as does Goytisolo, although the same images give birth to savage sexual cruelty, and slavery in Guyotat's universe.
Makbara is far more gentle than the books in his trilogy, having been published 5 years after Juan the Landless which closed the trilogy. Goytisolo compares his language to a snake - sly, sinuous, cunning - although it seems exhausted of its venom here in Makbara, although this is no point of complaint since its readers need not subordinate themselves to Goytisolo's abuse as was the condition for his earlier novels. One need only lose themselves in a sprawling and profusive language.
The serpent of Goytisolo's language slithers not through plot, but through a convulsion of images; this time through images of markets, North African bazaars, American malls, designer clothing, and Moroccan djellabas and kaftans; of bodies - in dress or in flesh - of vaginas, asses, cocks, hands, & eager mouths. These two dissimilar themes are, of course, synthesized; one cruises for commodities, products, and bodies alike as they walk along the streets of the bazaar or the aisles of the supermarket in Goytisolo's N. Africa. Maqbara is Arabic for 'grave', & Goytisolo used Makbara to refer to cemeteries where lovers steal away to be intimate.
The idea that Goytisolo intended Makbara to communicate the idea of sex as freedom is amusing to me since I took all of the passages conflating the market and the body, or commerce and sexuality, to be a more severe commentary on human sexuality, one devoid of intimacy. All of the talk of markets and bodies is not quite a language to liberate or an image to edify - Guyotat, too, writes of North African markets & bodies as does Goytisolo, although the same images give birth to savage sexual cruelty, and slavery in Guyotat's universe.