Realms of strife takes up the story in 1957, when Goytisolo is living in Paris with Monique. She has pulled him right into the centre of Paris intellectual life, rubbing shoulders with Sartre and de Beauvoir, Genet, and all the rest, and he's soon established, intoxicatingly, as the young anti-Franco intellectual-of-reference of the Left Bank. His early books are being translated into every possible language, and he's involved in protest actions and never out of the papers, in particular marshalling other writers to help get his brother Luis — also a writer — out of jail in Spain. He's soon invited to Cuba to meet the exciting new revolutionaries there, and he's organising a new Paris-based literary review to nurture the Latin American "Boom".

This all starts to come unstuck soon enough, of course: disenchantment sets in when communist friends are disciplined by the Party after Goytisolo criticises its policy on Spain, and worsens when some prominent writers on the left refuse to support protests against Castro's arrest of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. And then there's Algeria and Prague...

Moreover, things aren't going quite straightforwardly in his attempts at playing house with Monique and her daughter: an affair with a Moroccan building worker makes it clear to Goytisolo where his real sexual interests have always been, and a certain amount of painful renegotiation of the relationship is needed. They get through it and stay together — demonstrating once again that you can never put other people into neat categories — but in future there has to be space for Goytisolo to take off on his own to North Africa from time to time, to write and pick up men. And, of course, it is this "coming-out" exercise that also gives Goytisolo the motivation and breathing-space to relaunch his writing, shifting to more experimental books like Señas de identidad and Conde Julian.

There's a lot going on here for such a relatively short memoir: travel in Cuba, Spain, Russia and Africa; a positive shower of high-powered literary names; politics, poetry and intensely personal self-exploration; and quite a bit of unexpected comedy too. And Goytisolo complicates the narrative structure quite a bit, too, playing with the time sequence and adding third-person passages to the interplay of first and second we had in the first volume. Good stuff, well worth reading more than once. ( )

Publicada por primera vez en 1986, En los reinos de Taifa prolonga el itinerario memorialístico iniciado por Juan Goytisolo en Coto vedado, texto en el que acontecimiento y vivencia se amoldan a la perfección, dando la medida exacta del itinerario de la evolución vital, el tono justo de un paisaje en el que espíritu y acción se complementan. Articulada alrededor de los viajes, estancias y vivencias del autor en París, Cuba, la Unión Soviética y África, la obra se presenta en la edición definitiva que estableció el autor una década después de su publicación. Confirmación de la maestría de Goytisolo como uno de los grandes narradores españoles contemporáneos. ( )