The Garden of Secrets

Twenty-eight storytellers, one for each letter in the Arabic alphabet, meet in a garden in Marrakesh to tell the story of a poet, Eusebio, arrested in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Eusebio, a friend of Federico Garcia Lorca and his Circle, had escaped assassination and fled to North Africa. Goytisolo's storytellers question the nature of memory, history and myth. Tristram Shandy and A Thousand and One Nights are enlisted to show the chameleon nature of truth. In The Garden of Secrets, Juan Goytisolo reminds us that ultimately it is fiction that is the arbiter of truth