After the publication of Juan sin tierra in 1975, it might have been thought that Goytisolo had reached the limit in his process of radical aesthetic revolt. He had sealed the break with Spain and taken the process of dissolving the novel form to its limit, dispensing with narrative plot, the spatio-temporal framework of the novel, the concept of character and finally, in the last few pages, had severed the narrative contract with the reader, announcing ‘our communication has ended’, and, as though to hammer home the point, doing so in Arabic. The narrator of that novel had also claimed that if he wrote again it would not be in Spanish. Having established a process of creative destruction as his hallmark, it did not seem as though Goytisolo had left himself with any more bridges to burn in the search for ‘otros ámbitos de libertad expresiva’ (CC, 73). Once again he had manoeuvred himself into the artistic dead-end which he had always considered to be the natural destination of all serious artists in their striving to extend the limits of their medium.

Yet in Makbara the author manages to connect with the dominant concerns of the preceding novels and carry them a stage further. Contrary to what critics such as Gil Casado and Schwartz argue in their different ways, it is not the case that the novel introduces no major innovation. Both thematically and technically, the novel manages to break new ground. On the thematic level, Goytisolo has widened the horizon of his critical vision and engages with his target, contemporary society, on a broader front, including the Soviet-style state bureaucracies in his satire. In addition, Makbara extends and develops the theme of utopia which had made its first appearance in Juan sin tierra. The Arabic dimension is similarly taken a stage further in that the Arab element in Makbara is a more ambiguous composite of myth and reality. Large parts of the novel are actually set in Morocco, as indicated by the novel's title, and one of the principal protagonists is a ‘meteco’, a Moroccan immigrant. In Makbara, more than any previous novel since Señas de identidad, the parodies in the novel are non-literary, satirizing the discourses of the media, tourism and advertising.