Articles Available Online

In June last year the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo (interviewed in The White Review in 2014) died in Marrakesh, his home for decades While his reputation never waned in the Spanish-speaking world, his name hardly holds the currency it did in the 1970s when V S Pritchett could write, in the New Yorker, ‘It is natural that Goytisolo should immediately bring Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Beckett and even Nabokov to mind he is fully worthy to be considered among the major innovators of our time’ Many of Juan Goytisolo’s best-known novels, such as Marks of Identity and Count Julian, appropriate autobiographical material, national history and myth to subvert and explode notions of a unified Spanish culture fostered under the dictatorship of General Franco With his early works banned in Spain until after Franco’s death, he went into self-imposed exile in Paris, and later Morocco   Juan Goytisolo’s brothers – the poet José Agustín and novelist Luis – remained in their homeland, where their work is held in equally high regard Recounting, by the youngest sibling Luis – the opening novel of his vast tetralogy Antagony – is his first to be translated into English He began writing it in 1960, but due to a short period of imprisonment and censorship the book finally appeared in Mexico City in 1973; the whole tetralogy was completed in 1981 Although not widely translated (due to cost and complexity, we can assume: it numbers over one thousand closely-printed pages in the collected volume), Antagony’s status is such that, for the 2017-18 period, it became the required course text for students of Spanish in all French universities, replacing Don Quixote    Recounting chronicles the early life of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde The book hews more closely to realism than most of Juan Goytisolo’s, but is similarly a roman à clef replete with autobiographical detail It opens with the Nationalist victory in 1939 over the Republican ‘Reds’ and extends through the early decades of the dictatorship Ferrer, growing up in a privileged, conservative household in Barcelona, soon loses his religion; he does military service, joins the Communist Party (initially seen as the most viable opposition to Franco) and is later imprisoned for his political