He claimed that this level of status, accompanied by the cruelties of his great-grandfather and the miserliness of his grandfather (discovered through the reading of old family letters and documents), was a major reason for his joining the Communist party in his youth.

[3] His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, while his mother, Julia Gay, was killed in the first Francoist air raid of Barcelona in 1938.

His deep opposition to Francisco Franco led him into exile in Paris later that same year, where he worked as a reader for Gallimard.

Breaking with the realism of his earlier novels, he published Marks of Identity (1966), Count Julian (1970), and Juan the Landless (1975).

In Goytisolo's own words, he imagines "the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain."

The narrator in this novel, an exile in North Africa, rages against his beloved Spain, forming an obsessive identification with the fabled Count Julian, dreaming that, in a future invasion, the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity will be totally destroyed.