SOURCE: A review of Landscapes after the Battle, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1988, p. 318.

In the following review, Whalen lauds Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle.

“Please, no talk about ‘experimentation,’ ‘verbal syntagma,’ ‘levels of interpretation,’ ‘ludic intention.’” Fine with me. And why anyone would want to apply that kind of discourse to Goytisolo I have no idea. His works scream out against the language of oppression, wherever it's found. Landscapes after the Battle isn't a terrorist attack of a novel like Count Julian, but in its own way it's equally subversive. Rather than the headlong rush of consciousness that we find in many of his earlier novels, this time we have a “clumsy patchwork of a narrative” narrated by a writer who, like Goytisolo, lives in Le Sentier in Paris. “Our hero,” who is called, variously, “the monster,” “the protagonist,” “the polytypical memoirist and chronicler...