Forbidden territory describes Goytisolo's childhood and student years in Barcelona, growing up in a conservative, bourgeois family during the civil war, and trying to flex his intellectual muscles as a young anti-establishment writer in the repressive climate of Franco's Spain in the early fifties.

There are effectively two complementary narratives going on. Most of the book is written as a conventionally-objective, linear first-person story that takes us through key moments like his mother's death in an air-raid when Juan was six; his father's exaggerated homophobia; the not-quite-sexual idyll with the fisherman Raimundo in a remote floating bar in the docks; visiting brothels with a bunch of drunken Colombians during a stay in Madrid; the first visits to Paris and his first meeting in the Gallimard office with publisher and writer Monique Lange, who would become his life-partner. But that's set against italicised chapters in which the Goytisolo of the 1980s addresses his younger self critically in the second person, in a more fluid, novelistic stream-of-consciousness style, undermining the pretence that everything is a controlled, well organised career progression. ( )

Estuve leyendo este libro a lo largo de seis meses, desde que regresé de vacaciones. El año apenas empieza y debo decir que este es uno de los mejores libros que he leído últimamente. La claridad de ideas de Goytisolo, la forma en la que su narración parece fluir sin ningún tipo de traba, su muy convincente sinceridad, me hacen pensar que sólo un Premio Cervantes no fue suficiente para recompensar a uno de los narradores hispanos más hábiles de los últimos tiempos. ( )

Gran autor contemporáneo. Hay que conocerlo, así que haré todo lo posible por leérmelo.

One of the best Spanish autobiographic texts