Marks of Identity - Softcover

?Marks of Identity is an introspective novel, the first of a trilogy in which the protagonist, Alvaro Mendiola, reflects on the tangled roots of his identity...it is a masterpiece which should whet the appetites of British readers for the rest of the trilogy? Abigail Lee, TLS 'Juan Goytisolo is by some distance the most important living novelist from Spain... and Marks of Identity is undoubtedly his most important novel, some would say the most significant work by a Spanish writer since 1939, a truly historic milestone? Guardian ?This luxurious translation of a Spanish tour de force, about the return of an exile to his native Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, should captivate those who prize the elegant lyricism and complexity of Latin American fiction? Publishers Weekly

A Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona. His unease at being back reflects his deep ambivalence towards Spain and Spanishness. In a prose of ferocious intensity, Goytisolo lays siege to the Spanish language and liberates himself by overturning its conventions, the semantic rules of Hispanic arrogance. Having settled the score with his language, his culture and his political past, the author / narrator of Marks of Identity re-appropriates the existential freedom of the individual. For the anti-Francoist exile, this means accepting that ?the war is over? and rejecting nostalgia as the main source of political nourishment.