Space in Motion
Juan Goytisolo
Translated by Helen R. Lane
ISBN: 0-93-829-03-4. $8.95
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Spinning space into motion through the written word, Juan Goytisolo, in his first collection of essays to appear in English translation, also subverts place through the motion of mind and authorship--his own and that of his subjects, who range from Flaubert and Sir Richard Burton to John Dillinger and the looters during New York's 1979 blackout. Often called the greatest living Spanish writer, Goytisolo here makes himself at home in the exile's cosmopolitan world of travel, literature, and social criticism. Helen Lane's translation propels the book's passage into English with the same grace that has won her every major translation prize in the United States.
"This is Juan Goytisolo at his most pensive and irresistible, in a quiet off-duty book that is imperative reading for anyone who has or has not read his novels, indeed for anyone who takes an interest in modern Europe and one of its nimblest, most fecund minds."
Paul West
"Juan Goytisolo is now clearly the great commander of modern Spanish prose. This book is eloquent proof that this command comes from a dramatic sense of movement and perspective, of breaking out and breaking through to the Other. Jews, Arabs, the Mediterranean, the New World: all of Spain's rich golden threads now appear in the hands of Goytisolo, directed by his rebellious intelligence. He goes a long way to undo what the Catholic Kings did back in 1492: they discovered a new world and sealed Spain off. Goytisolo discovers that all worlds are both old and new, and dangerously open. His prose is an epidemic of contacts, alienations and communions. All the world is known, now it must be imagined. Space in Motion is also time redeemed."
Carlos Fuentes
"Rarely does fortune deliver so significant a book as Juan Goytisolo's Space in Motion. This collection of essays qua travel literature is in fact a serious study on the nature of understanding, a three-part polemic of elegant language and classic structure. . . . As Samuel Beckett's essay on Proust formed the core of his ideas, so this volume now expresses what Goytisolo himself terms "the generative nucleus of my most recent essays and novels."
Paul E. Hutchinson, Small Press
Juan Goytisolo left Spain in 1957 and has since envisioned causes and consequences of exile in many books, most notably the novels Count Julian, Juan the Landless, and Makbara--all translated by Helen Lane.