A Spanish exile returns from Paris to his family home in Barcelona. His unease at being back reflects his deep ambivalence towards Spain and Spanishness. In a prose of ferocious intensity, Goytisolo lays siege to the Spanish language and liberates himself by overturning its conventions, the semantic rules of Hispanic arrogance. Having settled the score with his language, his culture and his political past, the author / narrator of Marks of Identity re-appropriates the existential freedom of the individual. For the anti-Francoist exile, this means accepting that ?the war is over? and rejecting nostalgia as the main source of political nourishment.