Before his self-exile in 1963, Goytisolo was just one of the young neo-realists who kept alive the issue of social justice following the close of Spain's Civil War. Even then, in novels like The Young Assassins (1954) and The Party's Over (1962), his target was the bourgeoisie, the social and economic infrastructure that supported the Dictatorship and profited from its policies. But with Marks of Identity (1966), Goytisolo launched a project of introspection that in Count Julian (1970) and Juan the Landless (1975) led to a more inclusive view of the bourgeoisie. No longer was the novelist able to maintain the illusion that he was separate from the dominant class. Not only did it coincide with his intended readership, but the language in which he wrote was increasingly its creation. The novelist was therefore doubly "landless": excluded from the dominant culture by virtue of abhorring its materialistic values, he was also dispossessed of an idiom that he could call his own. (The devaluation of Spanish by "official" Spain, in its documents, radio and television broadcasts, and literary apologies, is a major theme in the novels of this period.) By closing Juan the Landless with passages that shift from Spanish into Arabic, Goytisolo gave vivid expression to his desire for a literary language still beyond the grasp of commercial manipulation.

In Makbara, Goytisolo continues that course, not by writing in Arabic but by celebrating the oral tradition of storytelling that still survives in the Arab world. Unable to dissociate himself from the bourgeoisie, he writes against it, damning it for surrendering culture to the forces of the commercial market. A civilization that thus promotes the death of the imagination is no longer a civilization. It is a makbara, a "graveyard," Goytisolo's metaphor for the modern Western world dominated by the bourgeois spirit.

The characters of Makbara find themselves in just such a world but they are still not altogether of it. Theirs is the age-old condition of lovers who, having glimpsed the ideal, thirst for perfection in the midst of imperfection. Equally ancient is their terrible predicament: they have become separated and must search for each other through all the lands of the globe, hoping each day for reunion and fulfillment…. [Their] longing for paradise turns them into modern-day lepers who trigger the defensive reflexes of people long used to spiritual apathy. Like Cervantes before him, Goytisolo thus refashions the byzantine adventure tale, giving us an odyssey of love that is at once a brutal critique of contemporary society and a verbal recreation of the world.

The journey taken by Goytisolo's lovers amounts to a grotesque pilgrimage whose goal, however, is not the Heavenly City, which is indistinguishable, in Makbara, from the totalitarian State. Rather, paradise lies in that part of the world which still cultivates the oral tradition of storytelling. Embodying that tradition is the Arab halaiqui, the silver-tongued teller of tales who daily spins a magic web of words in the public market place, the halca….

Goytisolo would have us look beyond the story itself, which can easily satisfy our curiosity, to the appetite for ideality that binds storyteller to listener or reader. Like Cervantes, Goytisolo knows that fictions that are presented as reality scarcely affect our craving for perfection. But fictions that confess their own unreality acquire an ambiguity that brings them close to our own sense of being and not being in the world. (p. 12)

At the story's close … our gaze is shifted from the imaginary fulfillment of unreal lovers to the actual ceremony of reading. The book in our hands does not simply contain a story; it is our own halca wherein the old hunger for adventure, for surpassing all familiar limits, is awakened.

By bringing his reader face to face with the fact of reading, Goytisolo breaks one spell only to cast another. He shatters the illusion that in the novel we may step into a virtual world, visit its places, meet its people and like a tourist return to our daily lives unaffected by the journey. That this is the manner in which we read novels most comfortably is a truth Goytisolo would readily acknowledge. Indeed, that this is the form of reading associated with a bourgeois public is the premise on which he mounts his subversive narrative. But from the ruins of that illusion rises the possibility of rediscovering the passion for ideality that brings storyteller and listener together in the first place. By interrupting our unreflexive flight into fantasy, Goytisolo positions us to recognize our participation in a ritual that antedates reading and writing by millennia. He obviously believes that a primitive need for fiction persists beneath the apathy of the public and can be aroused once again by the novelist-halaiqui. (pp. 12, 26)