ABOUT
THE BOOK

In Juan Goytisolo’s surreal fiction Karl and Jenny Marx sit on their sofa in Hampstead and watch a television documentary. Albanian refugees land on a private Italian beach flourishing photocopies of dollar bills in search of paradise Dallas. Find out how Karl reacts to the demise of the systems Josef Visionariovitch and Co. build on his word! Read all about the family life of the Marxes, moving upmarket from Dean Street to Highgate and beyond, yet never free of the hock shop!

A resurrected Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLenin T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hempstead housewarming reception and ball filmed by the cameras for a Merchant-Ivoryish Red Baroness–which subsequently becomes the subject of a Saturday-night talk-show featuring a feminist sexologist form UCLA, an anarchist form the Spanish Civil Bar, Bakunin . . .

But the narrator’s publisher, the urbane pipe-smoking Mr. Faulkner, wants a bestselling novel, a proper story with real facts and heart-rending descriptions of the Marx menage. Some hope! Goytisolo returns to the techniques of his youth, sticks in a photo of Helen Demuth, the family servant. Why bother with all that description? Leave that to Balzac. Now was Marx or Engels the father of her child?

Juan Goytisolo’s text, his most mordant satire yet, is a roller-coaster of bitter incentive and witty paradox, a verbal whip-lashing for the cheerleaders of the new world order.