✍ Scribed by Juan Goytisolo
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Generally considered Spain’s greatest living writer, Goytisolo here turns his extraordinary talents to more universal themes than in the past. Spain has always been an obsession with Goytisolo-as Ireland was with Joyce-but in Makbara he uses the land of his birth to transcend the geographical and the temporal. If, as Carlos Fuentes noted in The New York Times Book Review, Goytisolo’s earlier novel Count Julian was "a shout from the belly,” his subsequent Juan the Landless was more an abstract cry of pain. Makbara, on the other hand, exudes a warmth, a roundness, humor and human yearning that reflect the end of Goytisolo’s self-imposed exile from his native Spain.
Makbara—an Arab word which refers to the places in North African cemeteries where young couples meet to make love and hold trysts—is a book whose essential theme is love. Goytisolo finds sex by far the best cosmic joke ever perpetrated upon man, and much of the wit and black humor in Makbara stem from his vision of sex as the great leveler. "Sex,” says he, "is above all freedom.”
As in his earlier novels, style is Goytisolo’s very special and personal protest against all the doting Catho¬ lic mamas and the pale, sexless priestlings inflicted on him by the toothless Francoist agitprop, the of¬ ficial culture of his country for forty years. What Goytisolo is creating from book to book is a language he himself compares to a snake: sly, sinuous, flexible; a language cunning and mesmerizing as that, doubtless, of the first ophidian in that original Garden. Here, Goytisolo moves away from the masters of past and present to whom he has till now been most often compared —Sade, Céline, Genet. Makbara sings with universal passion.
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