I want to talk briefly about Goytisolo the person, not the novelist. My interest in him grew as a by-product of my larger interest in "medievalism" and al-Andalus, whose culture and achievements continue to fascinate me. In 1956, during the oppressive years of Franco's dictatorship, Goytisolo, aged 25, left his native Spain for France and became an internationally acclaimed novelist within a decade. However, he didn't go back, even after Franco, when Spain had eased into a democratic way of life. The continuing self-imposed exile was the result of deeply-rooted ideological reasons which were larger and went farther than merely the politically repressive climate of his birth land. He didn't want to return to a Spain that so brutally denied him his rightful Andalusian heritage and was, along with the rest of Europe, hell-bent on wiping out every last trace of a culture, which though produced by the indigenous Muslim, Jewish, and Christian population, was nonetheless something of an aberration, an unwelcome 'outsider' best exiled forever from the history of medieval Europe.
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