SOURCE: A review of La cuarentena, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1992, pp. 176-77.

In the following review, Clark praises Goytisolo's La cuarentena as an “exceptional tale.”

An intriguing, postmodern novel, Juan Goytisolo's La cuarentena will prove absorbing both to readers already familiar with his characteristically intertextual works as well as to new readers interested in discovering this parapatetic Spanish writer.

The novel recounts, in a mixture of first-, second-, and third-person narration, the forty days in which, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders between death and eternity, still in possession of a tenuous, dreamlike body. The principal narrator, after the unexpected death of a friend, follows her in his writings and in his imagination into this otherworld where all kinds of implausible—or are they really?—things occur. Able to pass from one world to the next, he is one moment walking hand in...