Juan the Landless

268 pp. Translated by Helen R. Lane. This final volume of Goytisolo's trilogy, written in the year of Franco's death, reveals his sentiments on his exile from Spain. Juan Goytisolo focuses on the surreal exploration and rejection of his own roots, Catholic Spain's repression of Muslims, Jews and gays, his ancestors' exploitation of Cuban slaves and his own forging of a language at once poetic, politic and ironic that celebrates the erotic act of writing and and the anarchic joy of being the ultimate outsider. In Juan the Landless the greatest living novelist from Spain defiantly re-invents tradition and the world as a man without a home, without a country, in praise of pariahs.