For Goytisolo, great writers are ?solitary birds? whose voices are an enchanting cry that pierces time. On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St John of the Cross. Through the scintillating successions of visions, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saints. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hideous revenge will be wrought on the heretic. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.