Disfrutable. Al comienzo, cuando se refiere a la política de las últimas décadas en España no dice nada relevante (al final es diferente). Creo que él mismo estaría de acuerdo con esto. Ocurre en entrevistas de este tipo, hay un momento en que el motor está frio y uno sabe que no está diciendo nada rescatable. Sin embargo, luego se calientan los motores y cuando Goytisolo va a temas más profundos de la cultura y la historia es de una claridad irreprochable. Para algunos especialistas, sobre todo de la academia norteamericana y para varios amigos colegas de España, no dice nada nuevo. Pero no es nada nuevo para nosotros ahora porque poquísimos como Goytisolo abrieron camino mucho antes.

Biographical

Name:	Juan GOYTISOLO
Nationality:	Spanish
Born:	5 January, 1931

• Attended University of Barcelona and University of Madrid
• Has largely lived in exile since the late 1950s, mainly in Paris and Marrakesh
• Visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego (1969), Boston University (1970), McGill (1972), NYU (1973-4)

Quotes

What others have to
say about Juan Goytisolo:

• «What distinguishes Goytisolo from other writers in the ever-widening international confraternity of young protesters is the clinical objectivity of his vision and the vigorous control he displays over his powerful, driving style. His works — short, violent and frightening — are like pages torn out of the book of experience.» – Helen Cantarella, The New York Times Book Review (18/3/1962)
• «(T)he foremost novelist of contemporary Spain» – Carlos Fuentes, The New York Times Book Review (5/5/1974)
• «The quality of Goytisolo’s translations has varied over the years, from the disastrous version of Marks of Identity by Gregory Rabassa to the masterpieces that Helen Lane made of Count Julian and others. Peter Bush [in The Marx Family Saga] does not reach Lane’s heights or sink to Rabassa’s depths.» – Abigail Lee Six, New Statesman (9/8/1996)
• «Now in his late 60s, Goytisolo remains a marginal man, at least in America, because of his nervy depictions of homosexuality, elliptical Modernism, his mordant sense of history, and an unfashionable multiculturalism — he knows and admires Islamic traditions. A self-exile from Franco’s Spain, Goytisolo proffers a ferocious critique of power as oppression: his dialectical standoffs between West and East, European and Arab temperaments, waver between positing irreconcilable differences, the result of centuries of injustice and misunderstanding, and tantalizing intimations of cultural synthesis.» – Bill Marx, Boston Globe (29/4/1999)
• «Goytisolo is one the finest masters of the postmodern.» -Sophie McClennen, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall/1999)
• «His greatest achievement to date is his trilogy consisting ofMasks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless. These three books can be considered together; though fictional, they are unashamedly autobiographical, and they reflect Goytisolo’s sense of alienation experienced both in Spain and in exile. Cumulatively, they provide a debunking of Spanish culture, ideology and language, and a rejection not only of realist fiction but of the very idea of literary genres.» -Shomit Dutta, Times Literary Supplement (17/11/2000)
• «Goytisolo’s fiction parodies traditions, dwells on solipsistic estrangement, and with coy postmodern irony questions the attempt to represent reality. But his journalism bleeds sincerity, and it uncompromisingly insists that ideals like toleration, respect, and magnanimity be put into political practice.» – Thomas Hove, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall/2001)
• «Thoroughly seduced by literary theory, Goytisolo maintains that a fiction writer should respond to movements in poetics and he invokes Russian formalists and French structuralists as patron saints. He tests his readers with punctuation-free interior monologues, citations in Latin and Arabic, dialogues in foreign languages, passages in mock Old Spanish, pastiche, unreliable narrators. The result is at times dazzling, but readability can hardly be counted among its merits. This may be intentional. One is not expected to curl up by the fire with a book by Goytisolo, but rather to be jolted out of any such bourgeois complacency in the first place.» – Martin Schifino, Times Literary Supplement (22/11/2002)
• «Juan Goytisolo is a literary philosopher of the highest type — a writer interested in destroying hypocrisy and its old guard.» – Joe Woodward, San Francisco Chronicle (12/2/2006)

 

Source: http://www.complete-review.com/authors/goytisoloj.htm