Quarantine     by Juan Goytisolo, Translated by Peter Bush Original title: La Cuarentena Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: April 1, 1994 Format: Cloth, 122 pages ISBN: 1564780449 List Price: $19.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

Click on image to see enlargement

Quarantine recounts the forty days in which, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders between death and eternity, still in possession of a tenuous, dreamlike body. After the unexpected death of a friend, the na rrator—a writer like Goytisolo—follows her in his imagination into this otherworld where all kinds of implausible (or are they?) things occur.

Meanwhile, television and radio report the 40-day war in the Persian Gulf, and images of war's destruction min gle with the narrator's vivid imagination of the torments of the underworld. Simultaneously, the narrator is writing the novel we are reading, for writing itself is a kind of quarantine where the writer withdraws from the world to wander in the otherworld of the imagination.

Quarantine is thus both an exploration of the human condition and an investigation of the writing process. It celebrates friendship and denounces war with equal force, and despite the grim themes is filled with humor, shocking surprises, playful language, and love.

"Goytisolo should immediately bring Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Beckett and even Nabokov to mind . . . he is fully worthy to be considered among the major innovators of our time."—New Yorker

"Goytisolo prefers words to action, and equates quarantine with writing itself. But his words do caress and sting, and are in that sense actions. He treats the loss of a beloved friend and the loss of humanity in war as disparate parallels, bringing them together in elegy, weighing the evid ence of things not seen."—Voice Literary Supplement Lit Hits: Our 25 Favorite Books of 1994

"Quarantine is an intriguing multilayered novel. . . . A unique meditation on death and the creative process by a distinctly original voice."—Kirkus Reviews

"Bes ides injecting an eloquent antiwar message, Goytisolo draws parallels between the soul's journey in the next world and the act of writing. . . . Bush, who translated Goytisolo's memoirs, deftly conveys the lyrical, complex, rhapsodic style used here to ev oke spiritual transcendence."—Publishers Weekly

"Quarantine is a short novel revealing the artistry and ideology of Juan Goytisolo, considered to be the most innovative and best Spanish novelist. . . . Depiction of the soul's 'quarantine' draws upon Sufi writings, Spanish literature, Dante, contemporary writers including Joyce and Borges, and the imagery of Bosch and Dore. The text is well edited. The translation captures Goytisolo's characteristic intensity of harmony in chaos."— Choice

"A challenging work by one of the giants of Spanish literature."—Library Journal

"An intriguing reflection of—and on—contemporary cultural turmoil and the distinctive fin de siecle overtones which accompany it."—Magill Book Reviews

"A lyrical, thought-provoking work that a variety of readers should find appealing."—Isthmus