The Anti-Orientalist (Published 2006)

On a blazing blue afternoon last winter, I met the Spanish expatriate novelist Juan Goytisolo at an outdoor cafe in Marrakesh. It was easy to spot the 75-year-old writer, sitting beneath an Arabic-language poster of himself taped to the cafe window. He was reading El País, the Spanish newspaper to which he has contributed for decades. Olive-skinned, with a hawk nose and startlingly pale blue eyes, he had wrapped himself against the winter chill in a pullover, suede jacket, checked overcoat and two pairs of socks.

By Fernanda Eberstadt

Considered by many to be Spain's greatest living writer, Goytisolo is in some ways an anachronistic figure in today's cultural landscape. His ideas can seem deeply unfashionable. For him, writing is a political act, and it is the West, not the Islamic world, that is waging a crusade. He is a homosexual who finds gay identity politics unappealing and who lived for 40 years with a French woman he considers his only love. "I don't like ghettos," he informed me. "For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we's." The words most commonly used to describe his writing are "transgressive," "subversive," "iconoclastic."

For much of the last 25 years, Goytisolo has lived in a kind of Paul Bowlesian exile in an old house in Marrakesh's medina. In Morocco, he has been able to indulge his passion for Muslim culture -- a passion that includes a scholarly interest in Sufi theology, the finer points of Arabic and Turkish grammar and a self-confessed predilection for working-class Arab men. His choice might seem to have further isolated him from the contemporary fray. Yet in Europe and Latin America, Goytisolo (pronounced goy-tee-SO-lo) remains a leading public intellectual, celebrated enough to have appeared as himself in Godard's recent film "Notre Musique." In the 90's, he made a documentary series called "Al Qibla" ("The Direction of Mecca"), which introduced Spanish viewers to various aspects of Islamic civilization. His political essays, denouncing the official neglect that led to last November's rioting in Paris suburbs, the corruption and tyranny of Arab governments or what he sees as the pernicious influence of Christian evangelism on American foreign policy, appear in Europe's most prestigious newspapers. When he was already well over 60, Goytisolo continued to report from behind the lines in war-torn Chechnya and conducted interviews with Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip.

But Goytisolo's writings extend well beyond politics. His novels, notably "Count Julian" and "Juan the Landless," have won him a reputation for daring linguistic and narrative experimentation. In Latin America, Goytisolo's longtime champions include Mario Vargas Llosa and especially Carlos Fuentes, who places him in the pantheon of legendary refuseniks, men like Jonathan Swift and James Joyce. In 2004, Goytisolo was honored with Mexico's prestigious Juan Rulfo prize for a lifetime's literary achievement. Gabriel García Márquez presented the award.

Yet he has remained all but unknown in the United States. This oversight may be explained in part by the difficulty of his fiction. He has continued to write in a densely allusive, high-Modernist style, which makes few concessions to the reader. In happier times, Goytisolo's preoccupation with medieval Islam's impact on Western civilization or the plight of Muslim immigrants in contemporary Europe might have made his work seem arcane to American readers. But in the post-9/11 world, this alternative vision often looks prescient. In "Landscapes of War," a collection of essays on the Muslim world that were first published in El País in the 90's, Goytisolo warns repeatedly that radical Islam is mobilizing a generation that has been impoverished and disenfranchised by the disastrous experiments of Arab governments with nationalism and secular socialism, which merely masked the military dictatorships that underpinned them. As for more theocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia's, Goytisolo compares it with Spain's in the centuries following Ferdinand and Isabella's Reconquista: a society characterized by "intransigent homogeneity," "autistic self-absorption and inquisitorial vigilance," whose New World gold (read oil wealth) is spent not on development or reform but on hounding dissidents and quarantining the nobility and clergy in ever more grandiose palaces.

The West is criticized no less starkly. Goytisolo regards Bush's invasion of Iraq, which he described in a recent essay as "the illegitimate war of an illegitimate president," as the crowning catastrophe in a series of American blunders in the Muslim world, extending from U.S. backing in the 80's of both Saddam Hussein and the Taliban to U.S. support of deeply unpopular and repressive regimes in Egypt, North Africa and the gulf states.