Scan barcode
A review by screen_memory
The Virtues of the Solitary Bird by Juan Goytisolo, Helen Lane
4.0
The last of Goytisolo's anarchonistic, disjointed and surreal writings for me (for now). The book opens with a tale describing the enormous, thin-legged witch on the book's cover stomping about the city causing widespread destruction and casting curses of AIDS and plagues (I believe that this witch-hatted figure is the personification of a nuclear bomb that is detonated later in the novel).
The narrative shifts from churches and cities and shelters where those covered in buboes and dying from the plague suffer their slow demise. The solitary bird, infected with its grievous diseases, is sealed away so that it does not contaminate others. This is the solitary bird, stricken by dangerous and toxic ideas, exiled and sealed away to avoid contaminating the minds of others who might suffer the plague of ideas possessed by the independent thinker.
The novel weaves through disjointed perspectives from a number of unnamed figures, and the tone shifts between them, from the somber to the ecstatic; from the miserable to the joyous, all in Goytisolo's familiar serpentine style, and in an indistinguishable pastiche of visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams.
The narrative shifts from churches and cities and shelters where those covered in buboes and dying from the plague suffer their slow demise. The solitary bird, infected with its grievous diseases, is sealed away so that it does not contaminate others. This is the solitary bird, stricken by dangerous and toxic ideas, exiled and sealed away to avoid contaminating the minds of others who might suffer the plague of ideas possessed by the independent thinker.
The novel weaves through disjointed perspectives from a number of unnamed figures, and the tone shifts between them, from the somber to the ecstatic; from the miserable to the joyous, all in Goytisolo's familiar serpentine style, and in an indistinguishable pastiche of visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams.