Exiled from Almost Everywhere

Spain's "greatest living novelist" takes on the Cyber Age.

In "Exiled from Almost Everywhere," Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist--the Parisian "Monster of Le Sentier"--is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued, he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the way--the imam "Alice," a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi--our "Monster" revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly real, "Exiled from Almost Everywhere" hurtles the reader through our troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.