Heirs of Cervantes
This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. At least it’s the anniversary of Part I (Part II was published ten years later after a fake Quixote sequel had been published in 1614).
The Spanish speaking world is awash in Quixote mania. The Venezuelan government has printed one million copies of the classic for free distribution and President Hugo Chavez has urged his fellow citizens to "feed ourselves once again with that spirit of a fighter who went out to undo injustices and fix the world". (link)
Madrid, among other celebrations, has hosted a 48 hour readathon, including various luminaries doing their part on the radio. (link)
I first read Don Quixote in the summer of 1988,
before my last year of high school. Never have I laughed so long and
loud (with the possible exception of while reading A Confederacy of Dunces, The Good Soldier Svejk, and maybe Catch-22).
But
this is a post on the heirs of Cervantes — several years later I
realized that, while I had a good knowledge of European literature, I
had not read any of the masters of Latin American literature. To
remedy this I started with the usual suspects: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and Jorge Luis Borges. I read The War of the End of the World, a novel of Brazilian history by the Peruvian, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the magnificent and inimitable Hopscotch by the Argentinian, Julio Cortazar. At present I have been reading some stories by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a friend of Borges.
In
2002 I discovered the twentieth-century Don Quixote: a novel by Alvaro
Mutis, a Columbian who has lived in Mexico since the 1950s. The novel,
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, is actually a
series of seven shorter tales, written beginning in 1986 and
published together in 1997. Maqroll the Gaviero (the lookout) is a
seaman whose continual wanderings take him all over the world. His
quest is for the absolute, and he shares with Don Quixote a certain
stubbornness, and a resigned acceptance of his destiny. His aims are
more modest than the Don’s, however, and unlike the famous knight, he
is never deluded.
The tone is often elegiac, especially in what
must be the most beautiful of the tales, "The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port
of Call." From Francisco Goldman’s introduction to Edith Grossman’s
English translation: "The overwhelming richness and marvelous
precision of Mutis’s writing and observation do delineate a moral
stance. . . And this essentially celebratory stance is also perfectly
in tune with Maqroll’s deep skepticism and "hopelessness," his
self-avowed freedom from illusions and fatalistic vulnerability to
risky schemes, those involvements into which he is also driven by a
paradoxical streak of boyish optimism, as well as by his fiercely loyal
friendships and tender, complicit loves."
What other suggestions do you have for Latin American literature? Or feel free to comment on your encounters with Don Quixote.
I have a number of ideas for you, especially if you are interested in Latin American colonial writing, or early Latin American women’s literature. There is also the generation of 1898 group, from Latin America, that you might be interested in. Let me know and I’ll be happy to give you examples and leads.
Comment by Brian — April 27, 2005 @ 11:03 am
Machado de Assis wrote some wonderful novels. Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas is an interesting novel in which the narrator is dead. Esau e Jaco is another one that I enjoyed, in which the biblical brothers are placed in Rio as the twins Pedro and Paulo. Despite being brothers they are natural born enemies. Honestly it has been a long time since I read anything in Portuguese or Spanish, so I am not coming up with much else at the moment. So much for that Portuguese minor, neh?
And now let me take this opportunity to rant about “Latin American Literature”. In the US studies of Latin America somehow leave out the majority of South America. Yes, I mean Brazil. Because they don’t speak Spanish they are the red-headed step-child of Latin American Studies. Their works, culture, and history are relatively ignored because people in the US are more likely to speak Spanish. They are the largest of the Latin American countries yet they somehow merit less attention than any of the Spanish speaking countries?
That said, Pablo Neruda is a great poet and deserves all the attention he gets.
Comment by a random John — April 27, 2005 @ 11:06 am
Borges and Garcia Marquez (specifically “One Hundred Years of Solitude”) would be my top two suggestions, but seeing as how those were already listed, I’ll add that I really liked Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits”.
Comment by Pris — April 27, 2005 @ 11:24 am
Sadly, there is a gaping hole in my reading that has been exposed by this post. Even sadder, I don’t forsee this changing anytime soon.
At least I’ve read Don Quixote. I may have to re-read it, given the occasion. Agreed that it is hilarious. I think I read it at about the same time as you, Bill. I remember your enthusiasm for the book from our days at BYU.
Also, I see that I’ve gotten my buddy Brian to comment. He’s a good source of information on the subject, as he is working on a degree in Spanish literature.
Comment by Bryce I — April 27, 2005 @ 11:26 am
Speaking of Portuguese, Saramago wrote the prologue to the Venezuelan edition of Don Quixote. Blindness was all the rage in book clubs around here a few years ago, but I preferred Baltasar and Blimunda.
Comment by Bill — April 28, 2005 @ 12:56 am
Be sure to pop over to 400 Windmills, a group blog on Don Quixote–we’re reading and talking about it together.
Comment by anne — May 2, 2005 @ 11:22 am
There’s an interesting Don Quixote-themed concert going on this weekend at Jazz at Lincoln Center (in the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle):
http://www.jazzatlincolncenter.org/prod/season_04_05/details.asp?EventID=463
Incidentally, Marian McPartland will be playing at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (the less formal venue in the same complex) all week. She’s celebrating her 87th birthday, so who knows how many more chances there will be to hear her — still, she doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Comment by Bill — May 2, 2005 @ 9:07 pm