The coarsest morsel of private life invades the public sphere and the brutalized inhabitants of our insignificant marble only seem exist as news items.

Goytisolo has always been lurking in my adult life. Slipping into the frame, always out of focus. Most novelists wind up drifting away. I can't explain the mechanics of literary gravity. I don't know the flaws of orbit. What merits retention? G's biography has always held an integrity for me. This remains the case even if it is steeped in humiliation. Ostracized as a Red, a Queer and finally as Arabophile, Goytisolo kept his poise even if his prose is often maddening. I keep approaching the late works as postscripts or summations. They are hardly such.

This is a novel about Extremism and Information. The afterlife is an internet cafe and cyberspace is our posterity. A suicide bomber has killed an author. (maybe Our Author) He'd prefer to stay dead but instead is inundated by updates and status feeds form the world, especially Revolutionaries and the Beautiful Ones, whose tension is a synergy, one predicated on the ongoing suffering in the shanties of the world. This is the Goytisolo of Marx Family Saga or States of Siege. Exiled is brusque satire, one weedy with resignation.
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El extravagante personaje de la novela de Juan Goytisolo, Paisajes después de la batalla (1982), cuyas profecías y visiones apocalípticas se han cumplido con puntualidad, muere al final de la obra, víctima de una bomba lapa adherida a su gabardina por un oscuro grupo extremista. Proyectado al Más Acá de la muerte, contempla ahora desde el ciberespacio la realización de sus delirantes augurios y decide regresar al Más Allá de su vida para comprender las motivaciones de quienes acabaron con ella, a fin de abrazar sus doctrinas y ponerse en la piel de su ejecutor. Novela del siglo XXI, El exiliado de aquí y allá inventa a su modo el arte de narrar de la nueva centuria con la claridad y exigencia que caracterizan la obra de madurez del autor. Su humor corrosivo, respecto de sí mismo y de su desdichado héroe, no deja obispo con mitra ni títere con cabeza. ( )

Lectura del grupo de 05/09/2009 ( )