SOURCE: “Alienation Effects,” in New Statesman, August 9, 1996, pp. 47-8.

Six teaches at Queen Mary College, London, and is the author of Juan Goytisolo: The Case for Chaos. In the following review, she praises Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga for remaining humorous while making “serious literary and socio-political points.”

Juan Goytisolo is a startlingly original writer, unjustly obscure in this country. Born in Barcelona in 1931, he recorded his childhood in Spain during the civil war and early Franco years, and a later life spent between Paris and Morocco, in his fascinating two-volume autobiography, Forbidden Ground and Realms of Strife. His earlier trilogy of novels, Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless, had an impact on Spanish letters and thought that can hardly be overestimated.

Since then his fiction and non-fiction have evolved in directions that open up untrodden territory, through a virtuoso combination of literary, philosophical and...