THE PARTY'S OVER

by Juan Goytisolo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 1966

Goytisolo, Spain's exponent of Moravian disenchantment, dealt with youth's restlessness in The Young Assassins (1959) progressing toward dissolution in Island of Women (1962). The Party's Over takes place somewheres in between -- in a grey area of boredom, inanition, withdrawal. These ""four attempts to define a love story"" have a saddening similarity -- husbands and wives, thirtyish, with no real attachment to each other or commitment to life, leading a dilettante existence, ""trying to chase ghosts."" Even the desultory affair does not work -- a wife with a young boy in a deserted Spanish seaside town, a lawyer with a petulantly tenacious young girl, etc. etc. Goytisolo often shows a fine technical control and can set a scene, limn a landscape, with a line: ""The eating stands were empty, and an autumn sun outlined the naked scar of the cliffs and the faded, quiet hills."" It is just that it is applied to four sketches, hardly stories, of marginal content in which the tedium vitac both circumscribes and nullifies.

Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1966

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1966

Categories: FICTION