Masks

Revealing a Paris both elegant and tawdry, this novel opens during the French bicentennial celebrations of July 1989. It concerns the affair of an American woman with Stephane, a brilliant, though drunken, violinist, and depicts her efforts to save Stephane from his wife, "The Monster".

From Goodreads: The author reflects on the links between the homosexual of the 1980s and his counterparts of a century ago--between gay lives today and those of Oscar Wilde, his friends, lovers, and acquaintances.

For Goytisolo, great writers are 'solitary birds' whose voice is an enchanting cry that pierces time. On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St John of the Cross, himself forced by the Inquisition to swallow his Treatise on the Qualities of the Solitary Bird. Through a scintillating succession of visions, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saint. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hideous. revenge will be wrought on the heretic whose work is seen to be as deadly a contamination as AIDS. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.