Although he is not well known in the United States outside of college Spanish departments, Juan Goytisolo ranks as one of the most important Spanish writers since the Second World War. His novels, stories, and essays are automatically issued in English-language editions by the major publishers, with translations by such heavyweights in the field as Helen R Lane. The latest Goytisolo work to come out in America (translated not by Lane, but by the much less reliable Peter Bush) is Forbidden Territory, the first volume of Goytisolo’s memoirs, written in 1985.

Juan Goytisolo is a member of the last generation of Spaniards for whom the 1936-39 Civil War was the definitive life experience. The son of a small-scale Barcelona industrialist, he was born in 1931, the year that Catalonia, with Barcelona as its seat, proclaimed the Republic. By 1936, with the victory of the Popular Front, “bloody, gun-ridden Barcelona,” as he calls it, had fallen prey to “the ideals and excesses of revolutionary struggle.” The top floors of the mansion in which Goytisolo and his three siblings had grown up were requisitioned by soldiers of the International Brigades. A band of Republicans sacked the family chapel. Goytisolo’s father, a Catholic and a monarchist, as well as an owner of the means of production, was arrested, but was later released when trade-union leaders from the Goytisolo factory intervened. By 1938 the family had moved temporarily to the nearby town of Viladrau. There his mother was killed in a