Nijar Country - Softcover

"Juan Goytisolo is one of the most rigorous and original contemporary writers."?Mario Vargas Llosa

"One of the most brilliant of living writers."?Los Angeles Times

An intimate account of travel in Andalusia during the 1950s, Juan Goytisolo's early, short narrative grimly revisits the province of Almería, still under Franco's rule. The critic Ramón Fernández Palmeral writes: "More than a mere travelog, Goytisolo bravely chose to report the social and economic life in the Almería of those Franquista years." He adds: "Brave, most of all, because by publishing it, even at first in France, Goytisolo risked being sent to jail."

To this day, the Andalusian tourist bureau highly recommends Níjar Country for its keenness and accuracy of observation?human, botanical, linguistic, geographical?so tourists on site and in armchairs may superimpose those still haunting walls graffitied FRANCO, FRANCO, FRANCO on what Níjar Country also indicts as "postcard Spain."

Juan Goytisolo, Spanish novelist and essayist, was born in Barcelona in 1931. He now lives in Marrakech, Morocco. His most famous novels are Marks of Identity (1966), Count Julian (1970), and Juan the Landless (1975), each of which was banned in Spain until after Franco's death.

Born in Barcelona in 1931, Juan Goytisolo is Spain’s greatest living writer. A bitter opponent of the Franco regime, his early novels were banned in fascist Spain. Publishing Níjar Country in 1954, he was declared persona non grata. For years, he says, his name was better known in police stations than in Spanish literary circles. In 1956 he moved to Paris where he married Marcel Proust’s cousin, the writer Monique Lange. After her death in 1986, Goytisolo settled in Marrakech, where he presently lives.

Peter Bush, the internationally esteemed translator, brings Catalan, French, Portuguese, and Spanish literature into English. Níjar Country is his eleventh translation of a work by Juan Goytisolo. Bush was awarded the Valle-Inclán Prize for Literary Translation for The Marx Family Saga . Bush now makes his home in Barcelona.