A Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona. This first volume of Goytisolo's great trilogy which includes Count Julian and Juan the Landless, Marks of Identity is a revealing autobiographical reflection on exile. Goytisolo comes to the conclusion that every man carries his own exile about with him, wherever he lives. The narrator (Goytisolo) rejects Spain itself and searches instead for poetry 'the word without history'. Marks of identity is a shocking and influential work, and an affirmation of the ability of the individual to survive the political tyrannies of the last century and the current one.