Landscapes After the Battle

Book excerpt: Trapped in his apartment in an immigrant district of Paris, the narrator is far from the high life of museums, elegant restaurants and boutiques. Within this imprisonment, his thoughts oscillate between revolutionary terrorism and pre-pubescent sexuality - a concern he shares with Lewis Carroll. Mirroring the conventions of Arabic texts, Landscapes After the Battle is to be understood from the perspective of its end; an end where the relationship between writer, the reader and the written is revealed as playful and humorous. The appearance of the comic in a novel by Juan Goytisolo is unexpected; like Dracula at a haemophiliacs? convention.