Review of Juan Goytisolo's The Garden of Secrets

It is unfortunate that readers here are unfamiliar with the oeuvre of this legendary Spanish novelist.

Hopefully, the power and lyricism of his latest offering will garner new fans who will go on to explore his earlier works, which are denser and richer in content, and also more stylistically ambitious.

Exiled from his native Barcelona as a result of his anti-Francoist feelings, Goytisolo's early novels were banned in Spain. Known for his realistic accounts of Spanish society after the civil war, his work served also as a polemical critique of the ideology of a cultural establishment that helped shape Spanish national identity.

Fiercely autobiographical, his novels explore what it means to be Spanish and push the envelope of literary conventions. As such, the comparison to James Joyce, who also delved into the problems of Irish identity and experimented with narrative structures, is inevitable.

His latest offering, although a miraculous feat of storytelling, does not delve into as many narrative possibilities as his earlier works.

In The Garden Of Secrets, translated by Peter Bush, whom Goytisolo has worked with closely on the translation of his earlier works, the story is deceptively simple.

Twenty-eight storytellers meet in a Cervantine garden, the same number of letters in the Arabic alphabet, to make up moments in the life of Eusebio, a gay, insurgent poet arrested during the Spanish Civil War who finally escaped to North Africa.

With a playful self-reflexivity, Goytisolo describes how the storytellers collaborated in a "systematic demolition of that disposable entity, the novelist, a happy, liberating dispensation". The "made-up" Author is even referred to as a "rag doll" to be stuck on the flap of the book's jacket. The Author represents, in this case, oppression, in a postmodern aversion to any singular and dominant point of view.

Hence the book presents a multiplicity of varying perspectives and literary styles, ranging from first to second and third-person narratives, where the voices of various witnesses to Eusebio's elusive life speak also from the mouths of his oppressors and torturers.

Interwoven with these accounts of the poet are intribuing and entertaining stories of minor characters, such as that of an ex-Pasha's Cook whose secret recipes are pursued by her present mistress. Here, Goytisolo's versatility as a storyteller is remarkable in his evocation of a melange of revealing and idiosyncratic points of view. The narration is often frenetic, passionate and infused with poetic and dramatic urgency, like the painfully ironic psychological account of Eusebio as one who has been reformed by the enemy and turned into a passionate defender of the political regime he had previously rebelled against.

Other times, Goytisolo's wit surfaces to create a wonderul balance between pathos and humour.

The stories, with all their political allusions, demonstrate the very human propensity for myth-making, as in the almost saint-like elevation of the Pasha's Cook, of Eusebio himself.

The Garden Of Secrets is possibly Goytisolo at his most light-hearted when compared to the despair evident in other works like his well-known trilogy, Marks Of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan The Landless, where Goytisolo is at his poetic best and most ambitiously experimental.

For newcomers to Goytisolo, this is a perfect introduction fo his incredible talent and an inducement to read everything he has ever written.

Published in The Straits Times, Life! on 24 Dec 2000