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A review by screen_memory
Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo
5.0
Goytisolo's what-have-you, Juan the Landless, is more of an anti-novel; there are no definite characters; there are sudden shifts in perspective, focus, and subject; occasional breakdowns in language.
The thing is, this (anti-)novel is seething with detestation for his native Spain, whose civil war not only led to senseless bloodshed en masse, but whose bombs took his mother's life. Spain was a country of brutal colonizers, of Christians who burned heretics at the stake, a country that took up arms against itself, murdering its own people.
The informality of the writing - there isn't a period to be found, meaning perhaps that the book consists of a single unbroken sentence which explains the lack of capitalization - is a sign of marked disrespect for his native language. He internalizes his mother tongue, ingests its vitriol, absorbs its spirit of violent history, and spews it back onto the country he despises, seething with racial slurs, hatred for the Africans they kept as slaves, violence toward the heretics the Spaniards burned at the stake, et. al. No hateful epithet, of course, is meant to be understood as Goytisolo's own. They are the historical concentrate of Spain's own hatred; internalized, sharpened, and thrown back in its face.
The final pages of the book is a sort of apologia of his literary methods, beginning with a panel of critics serving as a sort of meta-critique of the book's lack of characters, the absence of a single unified voice, and the fact that the book is markedly empty of nearly all of the components that are characteristic of a novel.
Finally, the bomb that Goytisolo was building throughout the course of the book explodes at the very end, leading to the absolute combustion of his language; his words smolder and melt, turning more and more into an incomprehensible, garbled mess, bearing little resemblance to the language that once stood in its place until, at long last, the facade goes up in smoke, the infrastructure collapses. What is left standing is the stolid substructure of the Arabic language belonging to his adopted homeland of Marrakech, Morocco which he lived in for 25 years after living in Spain.
The thing is, this (anti-)novel is seething with detestation for his native Spain, whose civil war not only led to senseless bloodshed en masse, but whose bombs took his mother's life. Spain was a country of brutal colonizers, of Christians who burned heretics at the stake, a country that took up arms against itself, murdering its own people.
The informality of the writing - there isn't a period to be found, meaning perhaps that the book consists of a single unbroken sentence which explains the lack of capitalization - is a sign of marked disrespect for his native language. He internalizes his mother tongue, ingests its vitriol, absorbs its spirit of violent history, and spews it back onto the country he despises, seething with racial slurs, hatred for the Africans they kept as slaves, violence toward the heretics the Spaniards burned at the stake, et. al. No hateful epithet, of course, is meant to be understood as Goytisolo's own. They are the historical concentrate of Spain's own hatred; internalized, sharpened, and thrown back in its face.
The final pages of the book is a sort of apologia of his literary methods, beginning with a panel of critics serving as a sort of meta-critique of the book's lack of characters, the absence of a single unified voice, and the fact that the book is markedly empty of nearly all of the components that are characteristic of a novel.
Finally, the bomb that Goytisolo was building throughout the course of the book explodes at the very end, leading to the absolute combustion of his language; his words smolder and melt, turning more and more into an incomprehensible, garbled mess, bearing little resemblance to the language that once stood in its place until, at long last, the facade goes up in smoke, the infrastructure collapses. What is left standing is the stolid substructure of the Arabic language belonging to his adopted homeland of Marrakech, Morocco which he lived in for 25 years after living in Spain.