[In the following review, Clark praises Goytisolo's La cuarentena as an “exceptional tale.”]

An intriguing, postmodern novel, Juan Goytisolo's La cuarentena will prove absorbing both to readers already familiar with his characteristically intertextual works as well as to new readers interested in discovering this parapatetic Spanish writer.

The novel recounts, in a mixture of first-, second-, and third-person narration, the forty days in which, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders between death and eternity, still in possession of a tenuous, dreamlike body. The principal narrator, after the unexpected death of a friend, follows her in his writings and in his imagination into this otherworld where all kinds of implausible—or are they really?—things occur. Able to pass from one world to the next, he is one moment walking hand in hand with his newly departed friend through some undefined area—a hotel lobby? a flying plane? an elevator? he asks himself—with music streaming out from some unknown place, and then on to other dreamlike settings, some horrific, some comical, to later being at home, watching in astonishment as his wife unhurriedly prepares the daily cocktail, and hearing her greet him as if nothing unusual had happened. In the other/underworld, he meets a host of enigmatic characters: Naquir and Muncar, the angels of death who, announcing themselves in a letter slid under the narrator's office door as Doctors Naquir and Muncar, expert accountants, courteously request that he answer their absurd questionnaire and whose voices and presence reappear throughout the forty days; the French-speaking Lady of the Parasol, who, always incongruously frivolous, appears and disappears throughout this unusual journey/meditation/novel in a variety of roles from travel agent to television host; and the panel of guests, including George Sand and a psychoanalyst, who continually pontificate, elaborating theories on such profound issues as war and human identity to which no one pays any attention.

La cuarentena is at once an exploration of the human condition, in life and in death, for which Dante and Ibn Arabi, Muslim mystic and philosopher, serve as the narrator's guides, and an investigation of the writing process. As one wonderful chapter explains, the creation of a novel is itself a quarantine (cuarentena) in which the author must withdraw from the outside world and establish his/her own world. And the written word that the author uses to create such a world is so powerful that then the receptive—contaminated—reader too lives a kind of quarantine, isolated within the bubble of the book. A rumination on the creative process and on human identity, La cuarentena also represents more specifically a denunciation of a cruel war, and the entire framework of a precisely Islamic tradition is far from fortuitous. The visions of Hell we see portrayed become gradually more and more specific. The hellish horrors of Bosch's paintings and Gustave Doré's engravings evolve into the more specific images of war, and more precisely, the forty-day war in the Persian Gulf. However this is not to say the novel is comprised only of one horror after another in some labyrinthine inferno. No. Humor, playful language, surprise, friendship, and love are also all elements of this exceptional tale. It is perhaps not easy reading, and to understand it well requires some knowledge of both Western and Near Eastern civilizations, as well as an extensive vocabulary, but the adventurous reader-accomplice cannot help but be “contaminated” by such a daring journey.