[In the following review, Whalen lauds Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle.]

“Please, no talk about ‘experimentation,’ ‘verbal syntagma,’ ‘levels of interpretation,’ ‘ludic intention.’” Fine with me. And why anyone would want to apply that kind of discourse to Goytisolo I have no idea. His works scream out against the language of oppression, wherever it's found. Landscapes after the Battle isn't a terrorist attack of a novel like Count Julian, but in its own way it's equally subversive. Rather than the headlong rush of consciousness that we find in many of his earlier novels, this time we have a “clumsy patchwork of a narrative” narrated by a writer who, like Goytisolo, lives in Le Sentier in Paris. “Our hero,” who is called, variously, “the monster,” “the protagonist,” “the polytypical memoirist and chronicler of Le Sentier,” and “anti-hero,” occupies himself with “maniacal, obsessive, almost canine nosing about the streets of Le Sentier; odd, unpredictable attendance at meetings and consultations of hermit-saints; perusal of scarcely recommendable reading matter, copying of newspaper clippings, epistolary fantasies, indiscreet eavesdropping on his wife's telephone conversations.” The “epistolary fantasies” primarily involve his fascination with pedophilia and the photographs by Lewis Carroll (here called simply “the Reverend”) of prepubescent girls. Other fantasies involve his pamphleteering and terrorist acts “concerning the genocide of the Oteka people, exterminated by Tartar hordes, with the connivance of the Celestial Empire and other Asiatic powers.” And, of course, there is the attack on the established language of the country, a “Hecatomb” Goytisolo calls it, “replacing the familiar script of the signs and posters of his neighborhood with alien and incomprehensible characters.” “[T]his confused and complicated narrative” is composed of seventy-eight titled sections (“Following the Trail of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,” “Misanthrope,” “Neither Stalin nor Trujillo nor Pol Pot: Bela Lugosi,” “The City of the Dead”) written in a language that can be arch, low, essayistic, forthright, slippery, and heavily ironic. The “deliberate universality” Goytisolo talked about in his recent essay “Captives of Our ‘Classics’” is found here in “the pluriracial osmosis of Le Sentier” and in his refusal to write a “Spanish” novel or to imitate other writers. Yes, Genet is here (two of his novels have been slipped in with the children's books in the library) and Lewis Carroll is here as well (like Alice, one of the little girls denies the fantasy: “Invent something else if you can. I for my part have all I can stand of this.”), but Goytisolo's books are, finally, unlike anyone else's. “I claim the inalienable right … to be different: the possibility of giving total expression, in the full light of day, to my deepest, most intimate feelings and affections, however much this may shock petty minds and scandalize timid spirits. …” That's reason enough for us to read Goytisolo.