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screen_memory 's review for:
Exiled from Almost Everywhere
by Juan Goytisolo
This novel is an utter farce of the anachronistic and the bizarre which I am usually a fan of (see: Malaparte, Kundera, Gombrowicz), but this one fell a bit flat. For being what I know to be the last of Goytisolo's works translated into English, maybe I approached the text with expectations heightened by that recognition as well as my mounting enchantment with Goytisolo's works.
It was a terribly short work - gone in a day - which might qualify it for a re-read soon to see if my view can't be corrected, but, with that said, Goytisolo, as always, is nothing if not thematically/conceptually peculiar: A pedophilic Frenchman's soul enters a sort of thereafter in the form of a cybercafe where he views all sorts of images of all sorts of corpses, victims of war and of terrorist actions (Goytisolo is ever the necrophilic aesthete), and soon comes into contact with the leader of a terrorist unit led by the bizarre "Alice" (the quotations are part and parcel of her identity), a woman who, when he is not performing in pornographic revues dressed in tights and garters, is coordinating attacks on the world the dead Frenchman left which he seems able to return to at will - and, no, the shift in she/he pronouns was no mistake; "Alice"'s gender shifts with every pronoun.
Goytisolo, fond of blurring dreams, visions and reality into an indistinguishable image; of synthesizing reality and irreality produces a seamless and nonsensical shifting of identity - of man or woman; of body or spirit - without ceremony and without explanation; it is a mere fact of Goytisolo's universe the same way most in this world do not question the fact of their simple physiological existence.
Nothing much makes sense, and even less is explained. As always, Goytisolo leaves everything obscured by ambiguity. The search for answers or for sense in Goytisolo's universe is a desperate and useless endeavor.
It was a terribly short work - gone in a day - which might qualify it for a re-read soon to see if my view can't be corrected, but, with that said, Goytisolo, as always, is nothing if not thematically/conceptually peculiar: A pedophilic Frenchman's soul enters a sort of thereafter in the form of a cybercafe where he views all sorts of images of all sorts of corpses, victims of war and of terrorist actions (Goytisolo is ever the necrophilic aesthete), and soon comes into contact with the leader of a terrorist unit led by the bizarre "Alice" (the quotations are part and parcel of her identity), a woman who, when he is not performing in pornographic revues dressed in tights and garters, is coordinating attacks on the world the dead Frenchman left which he seems able to return to at will - and, no, the shift in she/he pronouns was no mistake; "Alice"'s gender shifts with every pronoun.
Goytisolo, fond of blurring dreams, visions and reality into an indistinguishable image; of synthesizing reality and irreality produces a seamless and nonsensical shifting of identity - of man or woman; of body or spirit - without ceremony and without explanation; it is a mere fact of Goytisolo's universe the same way most in this world do not question the fact of their simple physiological existence.
Nothing much makes sense, and even less is explained. As always, Goytisolo leaves everything obscured by ambiguity. The search for answers or for sense in Goytisolo's universe is a desperate and useless endeavor.