The Review of Contemporary Fiction

State of Siege, by Juan Goytisolo, translated by Helen Lane
reviewed by Megan A. McDowell

Juan Goytisolo. State of Siege. Trans. Helen Lane. City Lights, 2002. 155 pp. Paper: $13.95.

Juan Goytisolo’s career has moved in an ever-widening circle of cultural excavation and exploration of literary form, becoming more enmeshed in his recurrent themes of exile, war, and Spain’s suppressed Moorish cultural history. The latest reverberation of these motifs, State of Siege, combines them with Goytisolo’s more recent thematic interest in the Arab world and is a well-crafted, dexterous novel whose slimness belies its reach. Like his mentor Jean Genet, Goytisolo is an exacting writer, eliciting the most meaning possible from his words to the advantage and delight of his reader. Set during the siege of Sarajevo, State of Siege provides the reader with the building blocks of a story, an assortment of texts centered on a mystery: the corpse of a Spanish visitor has disappeared, leaving behind writings signed with the initials J. G. These and various other texts involved in the mystery compose the novel—J. G.’s stories and homoerotic poems; the investigating major’s reports; descriptions of dreams that J. G. sent to a government functionary before his death; and the explanations given by a hotel employee and his cohorts. The reader joins various characters in trying to construct the “real” events from parallel texts that never coalesce, and in doing so walks a tightrope between literature and war, concepts that are closely tied in the world Goytisolo creates. The book explores the power of language in a war-torn city: it is both the prime target of the besiegers, who aim to wipe out the city’s collective memory, and the only weapon of the besieged, who fight their loss of freedom through humor and erudition. By creating an uneasy tension between the book and its components, Goytisolo exposes the most basic quality of consciousness that both feeds on and creates literature, the part that spawns violence and madness, humor and language.