A Cock-Eyed Comedy

by Juan Goytisolo is the book I just finished reading. Very, very ... uh ... flamboyant. A purposeful and yet confusing narrative that pits Father Trennes (aka Friar Buego) against the author in a contest for authorial superiority. This contests seems (it's hard to tell) to jump from one era to the next as Father Trennes (er, maybe the author?) transmigrates from one subversive author to the next. Writers as diverse as Sterne and de Sade are invoked in championing what he calls his "textual libido", which here seems most evident in the ribald recollection of assignations in Marrakesh, London, and Istanbul. Those are the places I remember, anyway. At some point the author, or one of the authors, pens this little ditty:

It's a total hodge-podge !
No narrative coherence whatsoever !
The structure's contrived, a pastiche !
Hallucinating self-infatuation !
More dithyrambs to machos and hirsute yokels !
That old inane onanist song !
No dramatic progression.
A circular, reptitive text.

Pretty well sums it up. Details of everything from curtains to shoes to Morrocan manliness is sumptuously, I should say gorgeously described, which in itself was almost enough to slow me down enough to follow the labrinthine plot. Almost.