Paris Readings

A fair amount (more than usual) of jetlag, plus the nigthclub that spews out 200+ singing and screaming drunks between 4 and 5 a.m. a bit further up on my street, have allowed (or forced) a fair amount of 3 to 6 a.m. reading these last ten days. Here’s a bit of it:

Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, by Juan Goytisolo, translated by Peter Bush. A compilation of two distinct but linked autobiographical narratives by the greatest of contemporary Spanish writers, who in his early thirties quit a very successful career as public intellectual in Paris (writing engaged novels and political commentary for the major French left-wing magazines) to move to Morocco and write those major pieces of fiction that start with Count Julian :

From a certain age, one learns to strip oneself of all that is secondary or incidental in order to bind oneself to the areas of experience which apportion greater pleasure and emotion: writing, sex, and love will henceforth be the deepest and most authentic configurations of your territory: all else is a pure substitute that an elemental principle of purely selfish economy advises you to do without and which you will do without entirely: as you will see from your own example, whoever aspires to become a public figure sacrifices his most intimate truth to an image, an external profile: literary favor is a chance and subtle matter and it usually takes vengeance on those who rush in search of recognition by distancing itself and then abandoning them: from your publishing watchtower you will witness over the years numerous examples of literary and moral erosion: that process of self-advertisement by the writer who, because of unfaithfulness to the most genuine sources of being, finally loses, unawares, his pristine state of grace.