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For forty-five years, the expatriate Juan Goytisolo has been widely
acknowledged as both Spain's greatest living writer and its most
scabrous critic. In some thirty books of fiction, autobiography,
essays and journalism, he has turned the Spanish language against
what he derides as 'Sunnyspain', flaying the 'Hispanos' while
excavating their culture's Moorish and Jewish roots. This, his
masterful two-volume autobiography first published in the
mid-1980s, broke new ground in Spanish letters with its
introspective sexual and emotional honesty. It charts the writer's
unique journey from a Barcelona childhood violently disrupted by
the Spanish civil war to student rebellion against the Francoist
dictatorship and exile as a 'self-banished Spaniard' to Paris in
1956. In Paris, Goytisolo fell in love with Monique Lange,
befriended Jean Genet, and discovered his own homosexuality as he
supported the struggles for Algerian independence. His passionate,
iconoclastic pen spares no one, least of all himself, in this
striking portrayal of politics and sexuality in twentieth-century
France and Spain.
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4:56 - Poems (Paperback)
Carlos Fuentes Lemus; Edited by E. Shaskan Bumas; Afterword by Juan Goytisolo
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R263
Discovery Miles 2 630
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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These poems by Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999), son of the
author of Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn, are an introduction
to the unique voice of a sensitive but unsentimental young poet who
became aware of his mortality at a very early age. A hemophiliac
who as a child contracted HIV from contaminated blood products, he
struggled to come to terms with his condition through the practice
of art while paying homage to those artists from the Western canon
(and from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) whose work inspired and
shaped his own, such as Keats, Van Gogh, Wilde, Rimbaud, Schiele,
Kerouac, Elvis, Hendrix, and Dylan. 4:56's heartbreaking "songs and
visions" record his fleeting passage through our world.From the
Afterword by Juan Goytisolo: "Beautiful, startling lines, without
the least self-complacency, imbued with a hidden and unsettling
pain. I have always been enchanted by the magic of English poetry,
and its ability to express more in fewer words than can other
languages that I know. Carlos Fuentes Lemus moved within its sphere
almost on tiptoe, oblivious to any rhetoric and easy
sentimentalism, with the delicacy and weightlessness with which he
fleetingly traced his path through life."
Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya is an incisive
examination of the tensions that exist between the West and Islamic
societies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These
essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s,
provide rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage
of life in four explosive war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West
Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the 17th century to the Gulf War,
the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this
book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue
to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political, and cultural
confrontation. Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria
and the war waged by French police against North African migrants
in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a
concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the
despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied
Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the
Caucasus. Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the
break up of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal
of fundamentalisms - Islamic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox -
Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm
fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary
figures of our time. Many of these succinct and eloquent essays
first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El Pais, and English
translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement
(London). Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he
was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and
contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two
volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the
trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless, and
the essays, Saracen Chronicles. Other works by him and published by
City Lights Publishers includeThe Marx Family Saga, published in
1999, and A Cock-Eyed COmedy published in 2005. Peter Bush is
Director of the British Center for Literary Translation and
translated Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga, which was awarded
the Premio Valle-Inclan.
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Celestina (Paperback)
Fernando De Rojas; Afterword by Peter Bush; Translated by Peter Bush; Introduction by Juan Goytisolo
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R442
R390
Discovery Miles 3 900
Save R52 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The racy and irreverent Spanish tragicomedy that is considered the
first European novel-in a spirited new translation
A Spanish "Romeo and Juliet," "Celestina" was published in 1499
and became Spain's first-ever bestseller. Readers thrilled to the
salty character of Celestina and her world of prostitutes and black
magic even as they mourned the fate of Calisto and Melibea, the
young lovers she unites using her wiles as a seller of perfumes and
potions. Fernando de Rojas's exhilarating mix of street wit,
obscenity, and cultured rhetoric mark "Celestina" as a masterpiece:
an original, explosive, genre-defying work that paved the way for
the picaresque novel and for Cervantes.
Legend has it that Count Julian opened the gates of Spain to the
Moorish invaders and introduced eight hundred years of Islamic
influence. The narrator dreams of another invasion of his
fatherland. Destruction will be total - myths central to the
Hispanic psyche will crumble: the myth of the Christian knight
always ready to do battle to defend the faith, the myth of the
macho male and its inverse the virgin female, and the myth of the
heroic Spanish personality forged in the rout of Islam. The hatred
of Spain is intense but it is a hatred that recognizes the debt the
exile owes to his homeland.
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