Cinema Eden

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To many, Juan Goytisolo is Spain's greatest living novelist and her sternest critic. An exile from his native land for over forty years (he left Madrid in 1957 to escape Franco's regime), he has mercilessly sought to overturn Spain's Catholic homogeneity by remembering the cultural influence of her medieval and Jewish populations. Few European writers know the Islamic shores of the Mediterranean as intimately as he does. In these essays about Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt, Goytisolo celebrates a world where ritual matters and tradition is alive, where saints live, story-tellers weave their enchantments nightly, and where honor and dignity preserve the importance of the individual. Goytisolo is to Spanish writing what Almodovar is to Spanish cinema. These essays are a fine reading of the vast, heterogeneous mosaic of Islam against the everyday truculent images of the mass media. "A deliciously pretentious aesthete, Goytisolo unashamedly romanticizes popular Islamic life in beguiling, immensely readable, poetic prose."-Publishers Weekly