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screen_memory 's review for:
The Garden of Secrets
by Juan Goytisolo
Another series of corridors cast in Goytisolo's narrative labyrinth through which the serpent here winds through the hedge maze of visions and dreams, fables false and fabricated - Ariadne's thread fumbled - and myths all deposed toward the singular aim of recounting the life of Eusebio. Who is Eusebio? He is at once a sage, destitute and surviving off nothing but alms and words of prophets, and an ascetic; a homosexual and a poet; an exile and a political dissident - all of these things at once, and, perhaps most likely, none of these at all.
The book is premised on the assemblage of a literary society composed for the sole purpose of narrating Eusebio's life through the tales, anecdotes, writings, and research heard and retold and conducted by the writers, all twenty-eight of them - one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. The society gathers to meet across three weeks, exchanging their stories, each of which follows a different narrative style, and, once the narrative project has come to its conclusion, the society considers a name for the fabricated single author of the novel, deciding on the name Juan Goytisolo. I know I mentioned Calvino and his If on a Winter's Night in an earlier review, but I don't know if I made this specific connection: Both books, above all, are about the pleasures of storytelling and of reading; about stories told for the simple pleasure of their telling.
One of the more interesting stories concerns, like many of the stories, individuals who seem to have no connection to the primary subject, Eusebio, whatsoever. It's a story that seems straight out of Ovid (but which may be more a nod to One Thousand and One Nights) where a man turns into a stork and flies to where his wife has moved for work for a handful of years in order to spy on her, witnesses her infidelity, but is then taken in and adopted by his wife and tended to and given free license to roam about the house as "she" (as he's mistakenly called) wishes, shitting all over the house and the bed, which her secret lover eventually leaves in order to sleep on the couch. The story has no evident connection to the subject at hand until the end when we learn the author retold his story as he heard it from his friend who heard it from his neighbor, and who was his neighbor but the elusive Eusebio?
The book is premised on the assemblage of a literary society composed for the sole purpose of narrating Eusebio's life through the tales, anecdotes, writings, and research heard and retold and conducted by the writers, all twenty-eight of them - one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. The society gathers to meet across three weeks, exchanging their stories, each of which follows a different narrative style, and, once the narrative project has come to its conclusion, the society considers a name for the fabricated single author of the novel, deciding on the name Juan Goytisolo. I know I mentioned Calvino and his If on a Winter's Night in an earlier review, but I don't know if I made this specific connection: Both books, above all, are about the pleasures of storytelling and of reading; about stories told for the simple pleasure of their telling.
One of the more interesting stories concerns, like many of the stories, individuals who seem to have no connection to the primary subject, Eusebio, whatsoever. It's a story that seems straight out of Ovid (but which may be more a nod to One Thousand and One Nights) where a man turns into a stork and flies to where his wife has moved for work for a handful of years in order to spy on her, witnesses her infidelity, but is then taken in and adopted by his wife and tended to and given free license to roam about the house as "she" (as he's mistakenly called) wishes, shitting all over the house and the bed, which her secret lover eventually leaves in order to sleep on the couch. The story has no evident connection to the subject at hand until the end when we learn the author retold his story as he heard it from his friend who heard it from his neighbor, and who was his neighbor but the elusive Eusebio?