Señas de identidad

Señas de identidad / Marks of Identity

Novel , 1966

Alianza Editorial

Pages: 464

The novel that best reflects the years of exile, the displacement and usurpation of collective identity by the victorious side in the Spanish Civil War. 

Through his alter ego, Álvaro Mendiola, Juan Goytisolo seeks, among materials as varied as letters, photos, maps, papers, reports and conversations, an identity blurred by his time in exile. Without feeling French, but without recognizing himself as Spanish, the author's alter ego sets out to look for his roots, dispersed in the mixture of voices that he finds when he returns to a very different Spain from the country he left after the Civil War. 

Señas de identidad soon became a touchstone for post-war Spanish novelists after its first publication in Mexico in 1966. With this surprising work, Goytisolo began a period of new experimentation in Spanish literature.  

"It is natural that Goytisolo should immediately bring Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Beckett, and even Nabokov to mind." V.S. Pritchett