Juan Goytisolo
| Juan Goytisolo | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Juan Goytisolo 6 January 1931 Barcelona, Spain |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist |
| Nationality | Spanish |
| Period | 1954- |
| Literary movement | Post-Modernism |
| Notable works | Count Julian |
| Notable awards |
Miguel de Cervantes Prize 2014 |
| Spouse | Monique Lange |
| Relatives | Luis Goytisolo, José Agustín |
Juan Goytisolo (born 6 January 1931 in Barcelona) is a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. He lives in Marrakech.
Juan Goytisolo was born to an aristocratic family. He has claimed that this level of privilege, accompanied by the cruelties of his great-grandfather and the miserliness of his grandfather (discovered through the reading of old family letters and documents), was a major reason for his joining the Communist party in his youth. His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, while his mother (Julia Gay) was killed in the first Francoist air raid in 1938.
After law studies, Goytisolo published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. His deep opposition to Francisco Franco led him into exile in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a reader for Gallimard. In the early 1960s, he was a friend of Guy Debord. Breaking with the realism of his earlier novels, he published Marks of Identity (1966), Count Julian (1970), and Juan the Landless (1975). As with all his works, they were banned in Spain until after Franco's death.
Count Julian (1970, 1971, 1974) takes up, in an act of outspoken defiance, the side of Julian, count of Ceuta, a man traditionally castigated as the ultimate traitor in Spanish history. In Goytisolo's own words, he imagines "the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain." He identifies himself "with the great traitor who opened the door to Arab invasion." The narrator in this novel, an exile in North Africa, rages against his beloved Spain, forming an obsessive identification with the fabled Count Julian, dreaming that, in a future invasion, the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity will be totally destroyed.
Goytisolo was married to the publisher, novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange, a cousin of novelist Marcel Proust, Emmanuel Berl, and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Lange died in 1996. After her death, he is noted as saying their once shared Paris apartment had become like a tomb. In 1997 he moved to Marrakech.
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Wikipedia