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The Marx Family Saga
(JUAN GOYTISOLO)

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The Marx Family Saga begins with a dramatic
description of Albanian refugees landing on a posh private beach in Italy, carrying photocopied dollars and dreaming
of Dallas. But
that''s just the news on television, watched by Karl Marx and his family in
their digs in Dean St, somehow transplanted
to the present. Marx contemplates the fall of communism in Russian and Eastern
Europe, debating its implications with visitors such as Anselmo Lorenzo ? while
Bakunin clowns his way around Europe, posing
as a billionaire and begging for money on the metro.

The author''s fantasies, his escape from the trials and tribulations of
writing, have become his novel. In part two, he imagines his publisher taking
him to task.

Mr. Faulkner''s welcome would be icy
the text you put before me is a mere succession of sketches, plans, outlines,
notes, doodles and drafts
(would he use up the list from the Dictionary of Synonyms sitting on
his table in order to ram his point home?)
No organizing thread, no plot, and the reader loses his way in a sea of
contradictory data and ridiculous anachronisms! Whenever he comes across a
story, you make sure you knock him off course and bring him back to the start,
to zero, to nothingness! Do you have any objections to what I''m saying?

(This illustrates Goytisolo''s typographical style, with no
full-stops or speech quote marks; initially distracting, this soon comes to
seem perfectly normal.) The author faces attacks from a Ms Lewin-Strauss,
giving the feminist critique of Marx, and there''s a suggestion that he should
write something suitable for film adaptation... In response to an injunction to
include Facts, he takes to including excerpts from historical appraisals of
Marx and his family by visitors.

The author now receives an invitation from the Marxes to a ball at Modena
Villas, which turns out to be the set of a film, Le Baronne Rouge. He
investigates the marriages and fates of Marx''s three daughters, Jenny, Laura,
and Eleanor.

when he spots you, the monocle dangling over his eye seems
to betray an ironic gaze, a mixture of guile and good humor
dear me, my long-suffering writer friend, are you still having fun rattling the
family skeletons?

Next comes a talk-show debate about Marx, in which the
author and the producer spar with an Oxford professor, a student of Godelier,
Ms Lewin-Strauss, an Indian historian, a Spanish anarchist, and an Eastern
European emigre.

The emigrant from Eastern Europe:
yet another utopia! Such words trip lightly off the tongue of a poet but not
from those of a responsible politician!

The Spanish anarchist: my dear fellow, I have to say that I
mistrust people who mistrust poets! doesn''t Marx''s well-known expression in
relation to his friend Freiligrath, what a miserable, wretched breed poets
are, by any chance prefigure the attitudes of future Communist regimes towards
Ahkmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Mayakovsky''s suicide?
Godelier''s student: Freiligrath, that mediocre versifier, was, politically
speaking, a weathercock! The bonds of friendship between Marx and Engels and a
great author like Heine were always based on an attitude of utter respect and
admiration!
The Oxford Professor: what does Marx reproach Freiligrath for? For the fact
that, as a poet, he needs freedom! For the fact that he had the courage to
write to him that the Party is a cage and that he sings better outside!

The finale takes place at Marx''s grave in Highgate cemetery, where the
author engages in a dialogue with Lenchen, Marx''s servant and mistress.

Despite the light-hearted presentation, Goytisolo takes his central topics ?
the fate of communism, Marx''s life ? seriously. There''s no attempt to explain
Marxist theory, but there is real substance in the presentation and even some
historiographical sophistication, with the narrative devices used to
contextualise different viewpoints.reciate The
Marx Family Saga without knowing much about the history of socialist
thought, but those without any historical background at all may find themselves
adrift in places.)

The Marx Family Saga is a surreal fantasy with something of the
logic of a dream, erratic in course and disjointedly plotted ? the publisher''s
complaint quoted above is quite accurate! ? And multiply self-referential to
boot. But it''s not difficult to read: its twists and turns are easy to follow
and it''s never unclear what is happening. Witty, clever and entertaining as
well as provocative and insightful, The Marx Family Saga is a
remarkable achievement.



Resumos Relacionados


- Manifesto Of The Communist Party

- Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography

- Capital (engels)

- Communism

- A Liberdade De Imprensa



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