SOURCE: A review of The Virtues of the Solitary Bird, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 239, No. 52, November 11, 1992, p. 48.

In the following review, Kagaroff describes Goytisolo's The Virtues of the Solitary Bird as “the story of the independent thinker throughout history, flushed out by those fearful of ‘contaminating ideas.’”

The solitary bird of Spanish writer Goytisolo's novel [The Virtues of the Solitary Bird,] is a figure of many identities, all belonging to individuals in some way dispossessed. In a feminine guise, the solitary bird suffers from a disease that leaves her not only “emaciated, covered with buboes,” but persecuted, imprisoned “in her hermetic cell” so she cannot contaminate others. St. John of the Cross, the Spanish poet and mystic, also figures as the solitary bird. Writing of “the intoxication and joyful consummation” of the soul with God, he was singled out by an “all-powerful ecclesiastical machinery” that would not tolerate...