In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant
protagonist--the Parisian Monster of Le Sentier--is blown up by an
extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter
with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued,
he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and
terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once
happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life
to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the
way--the imam Alice, a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi--our
Monster revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities
and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and
defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly
real, Exiled from Almost Everywhere hurtles the reader through our
troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.