Marks of Identity

by Gregory Rabassa (Translator), Gregory Rabassa (Translator), Juan Goytisolo (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $14.15

  A Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona. The first volume of Goytisolo's great trilogy which includes Count Julian and Juan the Landless, Marks of Identity is a revealing reflection on exile. Goytisolo comes to the conclusion that every man carries his own exile about with him, wherever he lives. The narrator (Goytisolo) rejects Spain itself and searches instead for poetry, the word without history' Marks of Identity is a shocking and influential work, and an affirmation of the ability of the individual to survive the political tyrannies of our time.

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $5.12

  A Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona. His unease at being back reflects his deep ambivalence towards Spain and Spanishness. In a prose of ferocious intensity, Goytisolo lays siege to the Spanish language and liberates himself by overturning its conventions, the semantic rules of Hispanic arrogance. Having settled the score with his language, his culture and his political past, the author / narrator of Marks of Identity re-appropriates the existential freedom of the individual. For the anti-Francoist exile, this means accepting that ?the war is over? and rejecting nostalgia as the main source of political nourishment.