SOURCE: A review of Quarantine, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LXII, No. 5, March 1, 1994, p. 234.

In the following review, the critic concludes that Goytisolo's “Quarantine is an intriguing multilayered novel, but one at times more powerful in concept than in execution.”

Spanish experimental novelist Goytisolo (Landscapes After the Battle, 1987, etc.), the author of a two-volume memoir (Realms of Strife, 1990, and Forbidden Territory, 1988), explores the 40-day journey that souls, according to Islam, take from the moment of death to their final resting place and reflects on the creative writing process. For him, the journey is a quarantine of sorts, akin to the experience of a writer who must withdraw from the world so that his imagination can take flight.

Indeed in Quarantine, Goytisolo's narrator is a writer in the process of composing a novel—in fact, the very novel we are reading. He is imagining his own death and journey as...