Synopses & Reviews
Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya is an incisive examination of the tensions that exist between the West and Islamic societies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s, provide rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage of life in four explosive war zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the seventeenth century to the Gulf War, the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political, and cultural confrontation.
Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria and the war waged by French police against North African migrants in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the Caucasus. Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal of fundamentalisms Islamic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary figures of our time.
Many of these succinct and eloquent essays first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El País, and English translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement (London).
Review
Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two-volume autobiography,
Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the trilogy
Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and
Juan the Landless, and a book of essays,
Saracen Chronicles. His most recent work is
The Marx Family Saga (City Lights).
Peter Bush is Director of the British Center for Literary Translation. His translation of Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga was awarded the Instituto Cervantes Ramón Valle-Inclán Prize for literary translation.
Tariq Ali, who wrote the introduction, is a writer and filmmaker and the author of four novels and more than a dozen books on world history and politics. He is also an editor of New Left Review.