Juan Goytisolo – författare

In Juan Goytisolo's surreal fiction Karl and Jenny Marx sit on their sofa in Hampstead and watch a television documentary. Albanian refugees land on a private Italian beach flourishing photocopies of dollar bills in search of paradise Dallas. Find out how Karl reacts to the demise of the systems Josef Visionariovitch and Co. build on his word! Read all about the family life of the Marxes, moving upmarket from Dean Street to Highgate and beyond, yet never free of the hock shop!A resurrected Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLenin T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hempstead housewarming reception and ball filmed by the cameras for a Merchant-Ivoryish Red Baroness--which subsequently becomes the subject of a Saturday-night talk-show featuring a feminist sexologist form UCLA, an anarchist form the Spanish Civil Bar, Bakunin . . .But the narrator's publisher, the urbane pipe-smoking Mr. Faulkner, wants a bestselling novel, a proper story with real facts and heart-rending descriptions of the Marx menage. Some hope! Goytisolo returns to the techniques of his youth, sticks in a photo of Helen Demuth, the family servant. Why bother with all that description? Leave that to Balzac. Now was Marx or Engels the father of her child?Juan Goytisolo's text, his most mordant satire yet, is a roller-coaster of bitter incentive and witty paradox, a verbal whip-lashing for the cheerleaders of the new world order."The most important living novelist from Spain." —Guardian"The Marx Family Saga is a surreal fantasy . . . Witty, clever and entertaining as well as provocative and insightful, The Marx Family Saga is a remarkable achievement."--Danny Yee, Danny ReviewsJuan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. Since 1956 he has lived in voluntary exile outside Spain and now divides his time between Paris and Marrakesh. His novels are The Virtues of the Solitary Bird and Quarantine.

Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya is an incisive examination of the tensions that exist between the West and Islamic societies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s, provide rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage of life in four explosive war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the 17th century to the Gulf War, the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political, and cultural confrontation. Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria and the war waged by French police against North African migrants in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the Caucasus.Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the break up of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal of fundamentalisms - Islamic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox - Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary figures of our time. Many of these succinct and eloquent essays first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El Pais, and English translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement (London). Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless, and the essays, Saracen Chronicles. Other works by him and published by City Lights Publishers includeThe Marx Family Saga, published in 1999, and A Cock-Eyed COmedy published in 2005. Peter Bush is Director of the British Center for Literary Translation and translated Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga, which was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan.

A traveler looks out his hotel window on a war-torn city. A mortar explodes in his room and, when the police arrive, the corpse has disappeared and only a notebook of apocryphal writings and poems is found. These enigmas lead into a labyrinth, where blind and barbarous forces lay siege to individual lives and diverse cultures. "State of Siege is a novel of pure fiction, but infinitely more powerful than all the big speeches about Bosnia."-Le Nouvel Observateur "A passionate dialogue with the reader, a reflection on privacy and commitment [engagement], with the steady vigilant presence of a great literary voice."-Le Monde "The reader is thrown into the unreality of a besieged city, as if a firm hand had rudely pushed him out of the tank that brought him from the airport."-L'Express "For the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, writing is a dangerous adventure."-Lire "Dreams, reminiscences of the war in Spain, thoughts on the novel, borrowings from mystery and detective fiction, references to ancient cultures and Arabic culture, numerous allusions to the narrative structure of Don Quixote-these make up the form of this novel that, as the author says in an ironic and provocative way, isn't written 'according to the rules.'"-Fayard Presse Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 and lives in Marrakech. In 1993, he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two-volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the novels Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Juan the Landless, Quarantine, Virtues of a Solitary Bird, The Marx Family Saga, and The Garden of Secrets, and the essays Saracen Chronicles and Landscapes of War.

A Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona. The first volume of Goytisolo's great trilogy which includes Count Julian and Juan the Landless, Marks of Identity is a revealing reflection on exile. Goytisolo comes to the conclusion that every man carries his own exile about with him, wherever he lives. The narrator (Goytisolo) rejects Spain itself and searches instead for poetry, the word without history' Marks of Identity is a shocking and influential work, and an affirmation of the ability of the individual to survive the political tyrannies of our time.

For forty-five years, the expatriate Juan Goytisolo has been widely acknowledged as both Spain's greatest living writer and its most scabrous critic. In some thirty books of fiction, autobiography, essays and journalism, he has turned the Spanish language against what he derides as 'Sunnyspain', flaying the 'Hispanos' while excavating their culture's Moorish and Jewish roots.This, his masterful two-volume autobiography first published in the mid-1980s, broke new ground in Spanish letters with its introspective sexual and emotional honesty. It charts the writer's unique journey from a Barcelona childhood violently disrupted by the Spanish civil war to student rebellion against the Francoist dictatorship and exile as a 'self-banished Spaniard' to Paris in 1956.In Paris, Goytisolo fell in love with Monique Lange, befriended Jean Genet, and discovered his own homosexuality as he supported the struggles for Algerian independence. His passionate, iconoclastic pen spares no one, least of all himself, in this striking portrayal of politics and sexuality in twentieth-century France and Spain.

Zum Geleit Fast alle Bücher von Goytisolo wurden ins Deutsche übersetzt, außer La chanca und Campos de Níjar. Sie waren den Verlegern etwas zu linkslastig. Deshalb habe ich die Aufgabe übernommen, sie zu übersetzen. Das tat ich vor über 40 Jahren und das erste Buch ist erschienen und dann ging dem kleinen Verlag das Geld aus. Er schickte mir weder die Übersetzung noch dazu gehörende Fotos zurück. Deswegen übersetzte ich jetzt das Buch zum 2. Mal. Beide Bücher haben mich von Anfang an fasziniert und ergriffen. Das erste handelt von einem Stadtviertel in Almeria, wo die Roma in erbärmlichen Verhältnissen lebten. Und dies Buch handelt von der sehr großen Gemeinde Campos de Níjar, wo Spanier fast eben so miserabel lebten wie die Zigeuner in La Chanca. Ich besuchte sie 1981 und war entsetzt. Doch jetzt, nach genau 40 Jahren, habe ich mir erneut im Netz diese Gemeinde angeschaut. Sie war fast nicht wiederzuerkennen. Die ganze Region hat sich gründlich verwandelt. Die Dörfer sind renoviert, modernisiert und liebevoll geschmückt worden. Die Gemeinde hat es vermieden, den eigenen Strand mit Bettenburgen zuzubauen, sondern hat stattdessen ein riesengroßes Naturreservat halb auf dem Land und zur Hälfte im Meer angelegt mit einem supermodernen Museum. Die Gemeinde ist zu einer Perle des spanischen Tourismus geworden. Deswegen habe ich dem Buch noch ein paar Seiten angehängt, um diese tolle Verwandlung dem Leser vor Augen zu führen.

Quarantine, a novel by one of Spain’s most provocative writers, recounts the forty days in which, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders between death and eternity, still in possession of a tenuous, dreamlike body. After the unexpected death of a friend, the narrator—a writer like Goytisolo—follows her in his imagination into this otherworld where all kinds of implausible (or are they?) things occur.Meanwhile, television and radio report the 40-day war in the Persian Gulf, and images of war’s destruction mingle with the narrator’s vivid imagination of the torments of the underworld. Simultaneously, the narrator is writing the novel we are reading, for writing itself is a kind of quarantine where the writer withdraws from the world to wander in the otherworld of the imagination.Quarantine is thus both an exploration of the human condition and an investigation of the writing process. It celebrates friendship and denounces war with equal force, and despite the grim themes is filled with humor, shocking surprises, playful language, and love.

Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo's trilogy (including Marks of Identity and Juan the Landless), this story of an exiled Spaniard confronts all of Goytisolo's own worst fears about fascist Spain.

In Makbara, Juan Goytisolo—widely considered Spain’s greatest living writer—again dazzles the reader with his energetic, stylistic prose, which he himself compares to a snake: cunning, sly, sinuous. But the themes in Makbara are perhaps more universal than in his earlier works. Makbara is full of its own kind of warmth, humor, and love. After all, makbara is an Arab word referring to the spot in North African cemeteries where young couples meet for romantic encounters. Sex, for Goytisolo, is clearly the greatest cosmic joke, the great leveller. “Sex,” he says, “is above all freedom.”

Juan Goytisolo's radical revision of his masterpiece Juan the Landless is the starting-point for this new translation by renowned translator Peter Bush. The new text focuses on Goytisolo's surreal exploration and rejection of his own roots, Catholic Spain's repression of Muslims, Jews and gays, his ancestors' exploitation of Cuban slaves and his own forging of a language at once poetic, politic and ironic that celebrates the erotic act of writing and and the anarchic joy of being the ultimate outsider. In Juan the Landless the greatest living novelist from Spain defiantly re-invents tradition and the world as a man without a home, without a country, in praise of pariahs.