The Virtues of the Solitary Bird (Masks/Begins on Page 11/No Capitalization or Indentation) - Softcover

Goytisolo, Juan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852421754 ISBN 13: 9781852421755

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 1991

Synopsis

For Goytisolo, great writers are ?solitary birds? whose voices are an enchanting cry that pierces time. On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St John of the Cross. Through the scintillating successions of visions, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saints. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hideous revenge will be wrought on the heretic. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.

About this title

Review:

'The most important living novelist from Spain? Guardian ?A transgressive, violatory, heretical text...the work of Juan Goytisolo defines from a Spanish point of view the permanant revolution of the contemporary novel. Surrounded by anachronism, chauvinism, the remnants of realism, the frivolousness of entertainment and lightness, rationalist terorism and psyche unease, the geography of the modern novel uses these boundaries in order to transcend them and, against all opposition, enlarge the horizon of human possibilities? Carlos Fuentes ?Juan Goytisolo is one of the most rigorous and original contemporary writers. His books are a strange mixture of pitiless autobiography, the debunking of mythologies and conformist fetishes, passionate exploration of the periphery of the West - in particular of the Arab world which he knows intimately - and audacious linguistic experiment? Mario Vargas Llosa

From the Back Cover:

For Goytisolo, great writers are 'solitary birds' whose voice is an enchanting cry that pierces time. On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St John of the Cross, himself forced by the Inquisition to swallow his Treatise on the Qualities of the Solitary Bird. Through a scintillating succession of visions, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saint. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hideous revenge will be wrought on the heretic whose work is seen to be as deadly a contamination as AIDS. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 1852421754
• ISBN 13: 9781852421755
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 162