Exiled from Almost Everywhere
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist—the Parisian "Monster of Le Sentier"—is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued, he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the way—the imam "Alice," a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi—our "Monster" revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly real, Exiled from Almost Everywhere hurtles the reader through our troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goytisolo (Young Assassins) misfires in this frustrating intellectual exercise, a circuitous journey into the virtual military industrial complex. Blown up in a terrorist attack, the Monster of Le Sentier lands in the Hereafter a giant cybercafe and makes some dangerous new friends, such as Alice, an expert in explosives manufacturing who sweeps him into the "machine of subversion" and the planning of the bombing of an "emblematic" public building. In brief bursts of shifting stream-of-consciousness, the would-be terrorist deals with fringe groups and dubious characters a monsignor who molests the children he purports to aid; a corrupt "Father of the People." Goytisolo's frenetic and paranoid effort is full of frantic action, but is so unfortunately light on things that appeal to most readers logic, coherence, characters you might care about that the whole project reeks of self-indulgence.
