Fiestas

In this powerful new novel Juan Goytisolo unfolds the drama of Spain today by focusing on a few of her lost and in­jured people. The canvas he creates is splashed with harsh contrast as he exposes the subsur­face realities of a country enslaved for twenty years; against the background of a city (Barce­lona?) resplendent in holiday regalia to cele­brate a Eucharistic Congress, he traces the story of some innocents whose dreams and illusions end in tragedy.

Among the chief characters are a little girl, Pira, who dreams of a mythical father in a castle in Rome, and a twelve-year-old boy, Pipo, who through his friendship with the Go­rilla, a sailor of prodigious strength and earthy appetites, enters into the forbidden life of the harbor. Both will discover in the cruelest way, as their elders before them have, that the make-believe world of childhood cannot break through the bounds of real life, of the misery and degradation that surround them.

The novel builds toward a magnificent, ironie climax as the religious festival, on the one hand, reaches its culmination in fireworks and rich pageantry while, on the other, the police dispossess a swarm of Murcian squatters from their shacktown. And, in the end, the lost find themselves drowned in the delirium of a fiesta that is neither of their own making nor for their salvation.