Resumo de The Garden Of Secrets

At the start of the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing
homosexual poet Eusebio finds himself in Melilla,
in Spanish North Africa. This is the starting point for a collaborative work by
the 28 members of a Readers'' Circle, among them

journalists, cinema buffs, fledgling writers, students
from Spanish and North American creative writing schools, sociologists,
lawyers, ethnologists, a graduate in Arabic language and literature, a
specialist in the language of Quevedo, two assiduous Readers of Ibn Arabi and
other mystical, esoteric writers.

Over three weeks, each of the Circle co-readers tells a
story about, or at least loosely connected to, Eusebio, building ? or at least
touching ? on what has gone before.

The result is a story for each letter of the Arabic alphabet, beginning with
ALIF, which explains how the Circle worked, and ending with WAW, which
describes the Circle''s invention of an author, Goytisolo, and YAA, a kind of
bibliography. The stories in between fall into two different threads. In one,
Eusebio is incarcerated in a fascist military hospital at the request of his
family, re-educated and given a new identity; he is then caught up in
Nationalist purges of Falange supporters. In the other, Eusebio escapes to Morocco, where
our narrators uncover a life with many twists and turns ? when they don''t
prefer to tell stories about women running restaurants and brothels, or fables
of marriages and humans turning into storks.

The framing conceit is nicely executed and extends even to the prefatory
material, where Goytisolo is credited only with having written down
the work and the copyright is assigned to a Readers'' Circle. The
individual stories display an extraordinary range, doing justice to the
diversity of their narrators in a kaleidoscopic display of literary,
historical, philosophical, sexual, and linguistic diversions and excursions.
The result left me wondering how much I had missed ? a second reading is a
definite option ? and wanting to read more Spanish and Arabic literature, to
visit Morocco, and to find a history of Nationalist politics during the Spanish
Civil War, among other things.

I wouldn''t say that Goytisolo''s Readers'' Circle has managed to put an
end to the oppressive, pervasive notion of the Author, but The Garden
of Secrets has managed to do something genuinely original with narrative
and perspective. It is not a simple work and readers after straightforward
plots and simple narrative should stay away, but neither is it heavy-going: the
tone is light and the individual stories are engaging, often arresting.

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