Juan Goytisolo Critical Essay | Critical Essay by V. S. Pritchett

Critical Essay by V. S. Pritchett

[The subject of exile] was established in "Marks of Identity" and "Count Julian;" now "Juan the Landless" … completes a trilogy…. [Goytisolo's] novels are a sustained skirl of love-hatred for the country he derisively calls "Sunnyspain" of the travel brochures, or "the foul Stepmother." He has the traditional Catalan contempt for the central power of Castilian government and culture, its stagnant bureaucracy, monkish fanaticism, and cruelty—the lifeless formality and obedience to custom which put a lasting puritan gooseflesh on the famous Spanish stoics and saints and on the spontaneous sexual life of the natural man…. Savage digs at the Castilian classics are among the farcical passages of "Count Julian."… The book was less a novel than a kind of anti-psalm—a chanted autobiography and a work of offensive travel…. There was an exhilarating scorn in that book. In "Juan the Landless," exhilaration turns to pain in the raw.

It is notoriously...
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