Juan Goytisolo (1931–2017)

Originally published in Buenos Aires in 1960, this short story collection didn't appear in Spain until after the death of Franco: Goytisolo put his fingers on rather too many of the sore points of the nationalist state for it to get past the censors. You just have to look at the opening story "Cara y cruz" to see why: two young men go out for a jolly evening in Barcelona, only to find that the police have swept the streets clean in preparation for a prestigious Catholic conference in the city. The ladies of the night have all been bussed out to Gerona, it turns out, so they set off in pursuit and find that it is indeed party time in that normally quiet town, with hundreds of displaced prostitutes all looking for work...

The seven short stories and one longer piece are all drawn from Goytisolo's experiences in Spain in the late fifties, as a student in Barcelona, doing military service, and travelling in the South with a companion presumably based on Monique Lange ("El viaje"). There's a lot of material that appears here as fiction but was re-used in a slightly different form twenty years later in the author's memoirs. In particular, the story "Otoño, en el puerto, cuando llovizina", describing the narrator's waterfront idyll with a fisherman called Raimundo, comes back pretty much in the same words in Forbidden territory.

The content of the final, longer piece, "Aqui abajo", doesn't come back in the memoirs. It describes the experiences of a university graduate doing military service in an obscure garrison town where there is essentially nothing for the army to do, and an awful lot of officers and men pretending to be doing something useful for the glory of Spain. In the narrator's case, his work mostly involves pointlessly copying lists of names from one ledger to another for a couple of hours a day. Goytisolo makes a point of telling us about the excessive drinking and whoring of the officers, about the (grass-) widows on the prowl for young men, and about the disgraceful poverty and illiteracy of the young recruits from Andalucia, all of whom are determined to do whatever it might take to avoid ever having to go back to their villages.

Interesting to see Goytisolo before he went all experimental, writing what is essentially social-realist fiction.… (altro)