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the complete review - fiction

Antagony

by
Luis Goytisolo

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : impressive, but a lot to take on and in

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Above all else, it has to be emphasized that Antagonía is an extremely difficult work. In the first place, the novel’s length forces the readers to prolong their reading for several weeks. Second, its style -- built upon continuous juxtapositions, cultural references, and apparent digressions -- does not invite careless approaches" - Isaac García-Guerrero, Hispania
  
  
• "Antagony is almost garrulous; many of its paragraphs are probably too long. Sometimes there is a flatness or too much striving for effect. And yet the narrative, in Brendan Riley’s translation, has a way of carrying the reader forward. At its best, the novel soars, using virtuoso imagery and bravura textures." - Colm Tóibín, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "En verdad, Antagonía no cuenta una historia acabada, con principio y con fin, sino fragmentos dispersos y arbitrarios de muchas historias que no se integran anecdóticamente, pero a las que da coherencia y unidad la voz que narra, una voz compleja y plural, de larguísimas frases laberínticas y sometida a constantes mudas en las que, con frecuencia y sin ninguna prevención al lector, se traslada del narrador omnisciente e impersonal a un personaje, y luego a otro, y a otro, y súbitamente regresa al narrador, exigiendo al lector una vigilancia tenaz para no extraviarse en ese territorio lleno de imprevistos y sorpresas por el que discurre la novela. (...) Libro ambicioso y complejo, difícil de leer por la protoplasmática conformación de la materia narrativa, es también un experimento que intenta renovar el contenido y la forma de la novela tradicional, siguiendo el ejemplo de aquellos paradigmas que revolucionaron el género de la novela o al menos lo intentaron -- sobre todo Proust y Joyce, pero, también, James, Broch y Pavese --, sin renunciar a un cierto compromiso moral y cívico con una realidad histórica que, aunque muy diluida, está siempre presente, a veces en el proscenio y a veces como telón de fondo de la novela." - Mario Vargas Llosa, El País
  
  
• "Recuento, which is, if one is not put off by the hard words and long sentences, only the exhaustively detailed autobiography of a very ordinary, middle-class Catalan youth (.....) Only the form is unusual, and its complexity does not grow out of any real originality of insight but from a systematic dérèglement of all the rules of clear writing. What is the point of these endless paragraphs, four or five-page sentences, nouns governed by upwards of a dozen adjectives ? (...) The purpose can only be a parade of stylistic and linguistic cleverness; a public trying out of a writer's raw materials perhaps as a prelude to a more serious application, but possibly just for its own sake." - Richard Burrows, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "These novels badly need a reader's guide, so that any single-handed review must be tentative. (...) If Raul flees Rosa and this low company and dedicates himself to measured reflection for a few hundred pages, then Antagonía may become a masterpiece. It will certainly be hailed as such in Spain, a land of complicit reviewers." - John Butt, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "A chronologically tortuous narrative of flashbacks, forward leaps, present observation, recollected conversation and abstract musing isn't made any easier by the absence of temporal markers (.....) This is undoubtedly difficult -- even aggravating. Yet it is also arresting in the immediacy with which it introduces the variety of experiences and stimuli crowding in on a creative and gradually maturing mind (.....) Teoría del conocimiento is the book it has all been about (.....) Narratives within narratives, worlds within worlds, the past within the present: we're at once at home and thoroughly adrift in a universe of infinite regression. (...) Reading Antagonía is, in the real world, almost an impossibility, requiring great intellectual commitment -- not to mention a month or so off work. But the rewards are immense: this is an endlessly stimulating gothic cathedral of a novel, a world to wander in --surprised, affected, diverted and perplexed -- for weeks on end." - Michael Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "In Los verdes de mayo, which in tone and mood is often more poetry than prose, Goytisolo centers his style on the poetic image, and his thematic material (on the surface the same as that of Recuento) now merges with myth. (...) (D)espite the mythological and metaphysical considerations implicit in Antagonía, Luis Goytisolo has been true to his own theory of creation: in Recuento and Los verdes de mayo he never loses the thread of his characters' personal lives and ambience, making him perhaps the most important Castilian-language novelist currently writing of the post-Civil War Catalan experience." - Roberta Johnson, World Literature Today
  
  
• "Through Matilde Moret, the protagonist/narrator, Goytisolo once again demonstrates his mastery of oral language as narrative vehicle, but written and read language assume the fore in this novel. (...) Goytisolo's construction of La cólera de Aquiles, while wholly different from the successful Recuento and Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar, is masterly, and it indicates that the now tired material of the Civil War and Franco Spain can be used as a stepping-stone to fresh novelistic turf. All the trite elements (the trauma of growing up with political repression and bourgeois Catalan values, youthful and misguided political activity, et cetera) are present, but they are overwhelmed by the concerns of writing and reading." - Roberta Johnson, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Antagony is a tetralogy by Luis Goytisolo -- yes, brother of the great Juan --, originally published in four volumes (or installments) between 1973 and 1981 but really meant to be read as one novel, which is how it is now published in its long overdue English translation. (Dalkey Archive Press did first bring out the first volume, Recounting, separately, but have now gone for the all-in-one edition.) As Ignacio Echevarría puts it in his Prologue, it is: "really just one novel, whose intentions are impossible to appreciate without reading the whole thing". It is a massive work, approaching somewhere near half a million words, complete with novels-within-the-novel(s) attributed to two of the characters.
       The main character is Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, an author stand-in in a novel that is very much about writing. The work as a whole proceeds roughly chronologically, a Bildungsroman chronicling -- and, in various ways, presenting -- Raúl's process of becoming a writer, formed by both his own experience as well as Spanish/Catalan history.
       The first volume, Recounting, is the most substantial -- not least in length, as it is almost as long as the other three put together -- and, in recounting Raúl's formative years, serves as a massive foundation for the whole. It will be a long journey then until all the material can be processed by the would-be author but, as he notes in The Greens of May Down to the Sea:

     Obstinately, like the person who returns to the landscape of his childhood and searches and searches in the amniotic lap of memory. Because in the same way that the young man usually rejects reading old authors and only after a number of years pass will he discover that they are closer to him than the greater part of his contemporaries, thus, in life, only after having walked around and around them many times do the landscapes of his youth acquire new value.

So, he says, not only does the writer always write about himself, but he always writes the same thing, without even being aware of it, new topics and new ways of saying things that barely do anything but redress, or rather, disguise, under new appearances, what he's always said.

I don't mean political commitment: what I mean is that nobody can write a novel about us, which is, in fact, what his novel is, a roman à clef, limiting himself to give testimony to a partial version of our acts, without going deeper, without at least giving things some meaning -- whatever that might be -- that make it literarily valid. Lacking all that, the tale is pale, darling. The simple objective transcription of our comportment, of our drunken sprees, of our affairs, no matter how well written it is, couldn't possibly interest anyone who knows us.

prostituted city, city of leisure pursuits and occupations, of political ambitions and courtesan hopes, prisons and gallows, lost glories and abandoned empresses, miracles and revolts, perverse and versatile city, twisted, malicious, pharisaical, Manichean, sweet-talking, dissimulating, keen, dissolute, insolvent, anarchic, separatist, fundamentalist, reactionary, plutocratic, rich loafing laborious city, libidinous, lascivious, insane, profaner of sepulchers, incendiary, blood-streaked city, caked in blood

Their conversation was dry, sticking with safe, general questions, the merits of some work by Sartre, or Pavese, the moral and intellectual asphyxia of the times they lived in, the lack of unrest demonstrated by the students at the university, the mediocrity of everything. Nuria said that things were even worse in the School of Philosophy and Letters, that one single class had been enough to leave her feeling fed up with that parochial environment of priests and monks, of exhausted, pale-faced young men, of girls studying simply to find a fiancé or because they were in despair of finding one. They wandered aimlessly, walking in circles, and the winding streets turned gray in the long afternoon.

the problem of living together, generally more destructive than living without a partner, marriage being an institution that only seems to serve the purpose, as years pass, of making people, increasingly conscious of their failure or grown accustomed to it, feel more alone and helpless as death steals, with the life of the first partner to die, any meaning from the disastrous life of the one left behind, now dispossessed of all justifications.

First losing Jorgito, my firstborn. Then, losing Eulalia, like a hammer blow. Then, the time of the Reds, always on edge, living like a refugee there in a town, with two children to feed and no resources. Then, my company collapsing.

Thus, the prospect of getting married and having children seems to me not only crazy but also ridiculous and even humiliating; the author must be exclusively devoted to his own work.

Because what's true -- and I know that Raúl knows it -- is that nobody really corresponds to anybody, that all the characters in The Edict of Milan are fictional creatures. Creatures, that's right, drawn with lines inspired by reality, taken from real people, from myself in the first place. As in all novels, I suppose.

     For Raúl, if I'm not mistaken, every author always writes about himself, no matter how far removed the book seems from his personal experiences, however distant his invented reality from his own daily life.

     Just as the reading of a work of fiction that we shall call A, in which the protagonist, for his part, settles down to the reading of a work B, included in A, a work which reader and character read simultaneously, prepares the reader for the later reading of new works in which the reality of the referent is not real but fictional, predisposing him, in consequence, to not seek in it any illustration of a specific reality, but, rather, the internalized vision of reality in general and of himself in particular, thus, in a similar way, a child's education, based not so much on reasoned explanations of reality as on the creation of images, analogies, and symbols.

According to the same principle, all reading, from the masterpiece to the latest comic book, constitutes material that each reader remodels according to a particular interpretive lens, whose roots, no less than in the case of writing, inevitably connect to early childhood.

reading a book is like underlining it with a pencil, like pointing out, marking with signs and even adding comments in the margin, not so much about what is important in the text itself, as much as about what is important for us

     Voices separating little by little, quieting down, falling off, and then only the wind, emptiness, nocturnal abysms, dark night, serene and starless night, calm, clear, quiet, a night transfigured, burning, opaque, pitch-black, placid, dark, black night black as a crow's wing hovering overhead, menacing, and so, clamor of complaints or perhaps wild laughter, and so, and so, so falling and rising and fading away, and so, and so, in slow inquisitive semicircles. So ?

the writer, however much from the start he hides his theme under this or that kind of literary expression, will always ends up writing what he must write.

- M.A.Orthofer, 9 December 2022

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Links:

• Dalkey Archive Press publicity page
• Anagrama publicity page

• Kirkus Reviews*
• Messenger's Booker (and more)*
• The Modern Novel
• Review 31
• RTÉ*
• The White Review*

• Luis Goytisolo at Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells

• See Index of Spanish literature
• Other books from Dalkey Archive Press under review

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About the Author:

       Spanish author Luis Goytisolo was born in 1935.

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© 2022-2023 the complete review

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