Una de les millors novel·les de Goytisolo. ( )

"Marks of Identity" is not an easy work in many respects. Let's start with the plot. In the traditional sense, there isn't one. Yet there is most definitely a story. The fabric of the story is the Spanish Civil War and the impact of its brutality on both those who stayed and those who left. The story is presented not chronologically but through personal stories of pain and the struggle to hope.

Goytisolo's style is both powerful and complex. The glue that holds the work together is the beauty of his prose. The simplest scenes and events are driven into our memory by the simple yet powerful flow of his words.

Not an inspiring story nor an easy read but one that is, nonetheless, an important and memorable portrait of Spain in the early 20th century. ( )

fitxa amb fragments sel·leccionats

Señas de identidad was the first of Goytisolo's books to break with realism (he later disowned the eight novels that preceded it). He deploys just about every modernist trick in the book: multi-page sentences; a narrator who switches freely between first, second and third persons; unpredictable scene-changes (the one I had to read three times before it made sense was when we switched from a piazza in Venice to a voodoo ceremony in Cuba in mid-sentence); inserted texts and documents; polyphony; language-switching (the book is written in Castilian, but he expects the reader to be able to negotiate quite lengthy passages of French and the occasional bit of Catalan dialogue; in the last chapter there are as many as five languages going on at once), etc., etc.

The multiple-voices thing is one of the most characteristic elements of the book, and Goytisolo builds it up gently from classic "now"/"then" alternation of the opening chapters to (apparently) unconnected narratives interleaved first paragraph-by-paragraph, then sentence-by-sentence, and ultimately moves on to multiple voices within the same sentence, so that the last chapter becomes as complicated to unpick as the final ensemble of a Mozart opera.

So there's a lot of virtuoso showing-off going on (and a few cheap tricks, like the way he gets the book to end on the words INSERT COIN in several different languages), but it isn't just about technique: Goytisolo wants to take the focus away from his disenchanted narrator, the exiled photographer Álvaro, and generalise his jaundiced view of the "menopausal society" of Francoist Spain into a much broader picture. Spain, as he sees it, is irredeemably damaged by centuries of (Catholic, feudal, monarchist) social control and exploitation. What money there is has been made on the backs of slaves (inter alia by Álvaro's family, who, like Goytisolo's, owned plantations in Cuba). The Civil War has left terrible scars on both sides, and Spain is being damaged further by rural poverty and emigration (we forget it now, but about two million Spanish workers migrated elsewhere in Europe in the 50s and 60s), whilst the recent opening up of the tourist trade is merely leaving scars on the landscape and putting money into a handful of greedy pockets. And the Spanish exiles in Paris are too damaged and divided to organise anything (they can't even manage to stage an orgy in an artist's studio...).

A fantastic, subtle, complicated and powerful book that it isn't possible to do justice to on a first reading... ( )

This started out brilliantly: shattered memories of a pampered childhood in pre-civil war and civil-war Spain, and the early years of Franco, recalled by a man who, we later learn, will go on to rebel, emigrate, and obsess about Spain. But the longer it goes the less point there seems to be, and this for a number of very good and interesting reasons.

What makes the start so interesting and affecting is the way Goytisolo combines large scale history with individual experience. The fact that the experiences are those of a child makes it even more moving; the scene of young Alvaro and his Nanny dressed all in white trying to get to a church, which is burning down, so they can say prayers/quite possibly martyr themselves, is amazing.

But as the book goes on, the tension between history and character goes a bit slack. There are sections which are very obviously 'history' (Alvaro remembers interviewing the poor and the peasants; the book reproduces their stories, which aren't at all interesting or affecting), and sections which are very obviously 'character' (Alvaro hang out in Paris trying to get laid; this is slightly more interesting than the peasants' biographies). By the end, there's very little tension at all, the divergent styles are more irritating than interesting, and I didn't much care what happened to either Alvaro or Spain.

Goytisolo is clearly tremendously talented, and I'm fairly sure he recognized these problems, and that's what makes the book's flaws so instructive: it's just that hard to write a novel that combines the individual and the historical without being cheesy or cliched about it.

I'd also like to know how good/bad this translation is. There's some definite weirdness (e.g., repetition of the word 'anodynic,' when 'anodyne' would have done perfectly well; people always say 'Halt!' rather than, I don't know, 'Stop!'), and the language isn't at all attractive. Is his Spanish attractive enough to pull a reader through the more tedious bits and the later 'experimental' sections? I hope so. ( )