Goytisolo's new novel, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush, is a fun, troubling, troublesome read. It's a tome of time travel -- Europe in the Middle Ages, the dark basement of a Parisian cinema house, Castro's Cuba, a 1980s gay bathhouse in Manhattan and more. It's also a jumble of literary forms: novel retold, poetry recalled, scraps of diary and news reports recaptured. As a collection of texts working to form a single narrative, it is, well, hard to follow.
"A Cock-Eyed Comedy" begins, really, as a picaresque novel with a Don Quixote-like protagonist, Father Trennes, who gets busy recounting a string of gay sexual encounters using the high language of Scripture: "After hallowing me, he'd stay on, insatiably ardent, searching for new hallelujahs steeped in indulgences." And further, "The only solution ... was to allow him to come up to my room for a quick prayer before breakfast. ... Prayer meetings thus continued for more than fifteen years." Father Trennes, later, transfigures himself from the itinerant Catholic cleric into the boorish leader of Opus Dei, a conservative present-day church organization.
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