Luis Goytisolo

This potent drama, a collected volume of Goytisolo's famed tetralogy following a Catalan family, is widely regarded as one of the most profound inquiries ever undertaken on literary creation.

Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo’s crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one’s artistic vocation.

Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.

"The story is long but engaging as the novel morphs into a memorial to a humanist civilization under siege, its icons not just Joyce, but also other modernists such as Proust and Hermann Broch. It holds up just fine in such company." Kirkus Reviews

“The best novel written in Spain, I was almost going to say in Spanish, in a very long time”. Guillermo Cabrera Infante

“One of the most important and truly new works of the current narrative in Spanish”. Pere Gimferrer

“One thousand one hundred pages of literature in its purest form”. Darío Villanueva

“The greatest narrative endeavour of the last five years of Spanish history”. Rafael Conte

“Luis Goytisolo is situated in the allegorical lineage, from Dante, Calderón and Gracián to James Joyce; but in large part he also converges with the rebels to any design other than the musical one, such as Proust and Faulkner, Beckett or Juan Benet”. Gonzalo Sobejano

“An ambitious and complex book (...) oriented toward the creation of a new language, a way of writing that breaks the traditional molds of the fictional story and inaugurates new ones”. Mario Vargas Llosa

“A vast, sprawling, endlessly stimulating cathedral of a novel. [...] A consolidated classic and a breakthrough novel at the same time.  Michael Kerrigan, The Times Literary Supplement

“Imperishable work”. Jesús Ferrer, La Razón

“No European novel of the last half of this century has so accurately reflected the irreversible transformation of an individual, a group and a nation. Using dazzling intelligence and humor… A masterpiece. The greatest literary monument that our city has deserved and achieved.” Miguel Dalmau, La Vanguardia

“One of the great novels of the last century, comparable in its achievements, and not only in its ambition, to titles like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, or The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil”. From the prologue by Ignacio Echevarría