[In the following review, Hopkinson praises Goytisolo's “impressively catholic selections” from his collection of essays, Saracen Chronicles, but complains that the author has overlooked women and Christian sources.]

“A preponderance of great writers have lived outside their own countries and I believe that this has many advantages. In the first place, it allows you to see your own country with both intimacy and distance. Then you also come to view your own culture through the perspective of others. And, thirdly, living abroad allows you to forget somewhat about the values of your tribe and establish your own scale of values.”

Juan Goytisolo is acclaimed as one of the greatest living writers, perhaps Spain's most successful “alienated author”. A victim of Franco's censorship, directed at the Turin group of writers he helped found, Goytisolo left his native Barcelona and settled in Paris in 1956. He now divides the year between there, where he is married to fellow writer Monique Lange, and Marrakech. Like all great writers, Goytisolo is a great reader. The exploration of Latin and Arab cultures is the hallmark of his vast output as journalist and campaigner, novelist and lecturer, essayist and, latterly, as creator of a television series devoted to Islamic culture.

Goytisolo is in England as guest of the European Arts Festival's literature programme, resident at Ruskin College, Oxford, and lecturing on such topics as “Fortress Europe” and “We Could All be Bosnians”. His visit coincides with the publication of Saracen Chronicles, a collection of literary essays that betray Goytisolo's preferences for a Spanish “sub-literature” which, he proudly acknowledges, “doesn't in any way correspond to the teaching of literature in Spain”.

Goytisolo's taste runs from the satirical to the scatological and deals in social as well as literary taboos. He unearths scabrous material that has had little, if any, currency in the “lost 500 years” between the dusk of the Middle Ages and the dawn of a rediscovery of “the Other”, amid the clashes and conflicts of the present century.

Many of the Saracen Chronicles may be almost as unfamiliar to Spanish as English audiences, as are some of his interpretations of known texts. He offers a post-Freudian reading of “the erotic metaphor” in Góngora, Joaquín Belda and Lezama Lima; a revisionist reading of Carlos Fuentes; a “Cervantine” one of the Cuban writer G Cabrera Infante; and “a possible orientalist reading” of those of his own earlier novels not discarded by the author for their “realism”. While the title reveals Goytisolo's continuing preference for a “Moorish rendition”, the barrage of chapter headings suggests flux as well as scope, with the truth of the matter implicit in the variety of its versions.

The Brazilian Joāo Ubaldo Ribeiro has succinctly defined “the secret of Truth as follows: there are not facts, only stories”. Goytisolo works as a vast integrating literary force—but also as a great storyteller with an appreciation of those who have gone before.

Among them, Cervantes: the original Don Quixote claims its origins in a manuscript written by Cid Hamete Benengali and translated by a “Morisco”. As if to establish incontrovertibly its lack of veracity, Cervantes adds: “Of course we all know Moors are liars.” This clearly implies that his fable is not to be taken on the level of a true story about a foolhardy knight.

Goytisolo bypasses this comment, observing simply that “Cervantes … never sets himself up as a possessor of the Truth … on the contrary, he acts as a disseminator of a multiplicity of lower-class truths, in as much as he allows the Other every opportunity to express a viewpoint opposed to the one commonly held by the public for whom his work was intended”. He concludes that the work is a true rendition of Islamic origins, and “it would be inexplicable, had it not been for the fertilising influence of Islam”.

When Goytisolo brings Cervantes' work into contemporary history, talking like “those pure, hard-core communists who suddenly desert and become turncoats” and reliving “in my imagination the shadows and the lacunae of Cervantes' experience in Algiers”, he lays himself open to the charges of idealising Arab culture and over-estimating its influence. It is no more essential to believe Cervantes incapable of creating without “the fertilising influence of Islam” than to believe that St John of the Cross (about whom Goytisolo wrote his Virtues of the Solitary Bird) derived his mysticism from an Islamic rather than a Christian tradition.

Goytisolo is as provocative as he is paradoxical. The provocation lies not only in incurring the predictable wrath of powers-that-be for his radical politics, defended with a heroic spirit to match his eloquence, but in that element of protesting-too-much. By offering a different reading of Spanish literature, Goytisolo comes perilously close to implying that the best survives not just despite Spain, but because of a mythic Islam, redolent of that European invention the Arabian Nights, where lives are bought with endless tale-telling. In mounting such a necessary attack on the neglected and rejected in Iberian literature, Goytisolo neglects and rejects elements of his own.

A glaring absence in all these writings on the theme of the Other is a sense of the other gender, woman. It is as though, in asserting his homosexuality, Goytisolo has disposed of the sexual Other. Is it really such an accident that in the whole of Goytisolo's opening lecture, “To Read or to Re-Read”—in which he strenuously recommended the latter—not one woman author features in his impressively catholic selection? And his understandable contempt for the repression wrought by the Catholic Church leads him to reject the undeniable abundance of Christian references and traditions, and so to give an oddly unbalanced account.

Goytisolo is unarguably a daunting author, who feels strongly that few concessions should be made to an uninformed readership. Implicitly, by returning to lesser-known Jewish and Islamic medieval literature, and explicitly, in attacking the succession of wars waged after 1492 on a hated Other created by racist nationalism, he forces his readers to think and think again. Or, in his terms of highest praise, to read—and re-read.