The Marx Family Saga

US: City Lights Books, 2001. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. In Juan Goytisolo's surreal fiction Karl and Jenny Marx sit on their sofa i n 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 Jos ef Visionariovitch and Co. build on his word! Read all about the family lif e of the Marxes, moving upmarket from Dean Street to Highgate and beyond, y et never free of the hock shop! A resurrected Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLen in T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hemps tead housewarming reception and ball filmed by the cameras for a Merchant-I voryish Red Baroness--which subsequently becomes the subject of a Saturday- night talk-show featuring a feminist sexologist form UCLA, an anarchist for m 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 descri ptions of the Marx menage. Some hope! Goytisolo returns to the techniques o f his youth, sticks in a photo of Helen Demuth, the family servant. Why bot her 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 cheerlead ers of the new world order. "The most important living.