State of Siege, by Juan Goytisolo
published in 1995, English translation by Helen Lane, 2002, City Lights Books
Me and The Major
An Interview With Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo
by Ben Ehrenreich Fall 2002
http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/178,ehrenreich,39006,21.html
Except for a scattering of dream fragments and apocalyptic fantasies, State of Siege, Juan Goytisolo's eighth novel to be published in the U.S., begins reasonably conventionally. About a quarter of the way through, though, a major in the International Mediation Force, stationed in a Sarajevo-like city under siege, realizes that a letter he is reading "correspond[s] word for word to the contents of Thethe first pages of the present book." From then on in it's all Russian dolls and Chinese boxes, a labyrinth of texts within texts that would have dizzied Borges. Goytisolo's narrative contortionism is not mere postmodern showmanship, but precisely the point—that the reader, like the inhabitants of the besieged city, is "caught in the rattrap," cornered in an epistemological purgatory in which "Reality has been transmuted into fiction: the horror tale of our daily existence!"
(an interview with the author, in Marrakesh, Morocco)
(Books: The Spanish inquisition
The Independent (London), Oct 24, 2003 by GERRY FEEHILY)
...Paris in 1956, where he frequented literary circles involved in opposition to the war in Algeria. Most crucially, however, he befriended the writer Jean Genet, whose play about Algeria, The Balcony, was causing riots. "Genet was like a Malamiti, one of those Sufi mystics who believed in order to attain moral perfection, one did everything to be despised, pride being the worst sin," he recalls. "He sang in praise of treason, homosexuality, the Algerian independence struggle, everything a provocation, but always with the deepest moral rigour."
With Genet he made his first trips to Tangier in the late Fifties, where he underwent a creative awakening. Goytisolo, as "the first Spanish author since the 12th-century Archpriest of Hita to speak a dialect of Arabic, a dialect spoken not more than 15km from the southern tip of Spain," launched a mortar across the strait with the 1966 publication of Marks of Identity, a novel that, in his own words, "dynamites coventional Spanish". Sexually explicit, a bitter denunciation of Francoist Spain, Marks of Identity was banned in his native country, like all his works until the dictator's death.
