Juan Goytisolo

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In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist—the Parisian "Monster of Le Sentier"—is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued, he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the way—the imam "Alice," a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi—our "Monster" revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly real, Exiled from Almost Everywhere hurtles the reader through our troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.

 

IN THE HEREAFTER

Just as he was leaving the wake for one of his acquaintances in the locality, the Italian barber on the corner (whose verbal diarrhea and constant recourse to clichés he preferred to dodge) smirked like a smart-ass and quipped: "The afterlife must be really wild, don't you reckon? As far as I know, nobody’s ever tried to get back to this dump!"

The Forza Italia patriot got it totally wrong because, even when reduced to smithereens, he had decided he did want to return to the planet where a terrorist detonated the explosive device hidden in the lining of his gabardine, thus dispatching him and his book to the Hereafter. He suddenly found himself in a deserted cybercafé with thousands (millions) of computers and their respective workstations. A giant panel flashed on and off, tirelessly repeating the same message: VIRTUAL UNIVERSE. He didn’t know what to do next or what was expected of him and roamed the void of infinite space until he flopped down exhausted in front of one of the keyboards only to see his own face on the screen, complete with hat and dark tinted glasses under the heading “The Monster of Le Sentier.”

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