Despite drawing from the same source, the two American-resident exiles have produced very different novels, whose charms might just spare them Cervantes’s flames of eternal damnation. In the twenty-first, it is the turn of Ariel Dorfman and Salman Rushdie. Novels, dramas, operas, poems, movies, paintings, and sculptures resurrect him and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, in every century. “Such intolerable stuff,” cried the first devil, “that if I and all the devils in Hell should set their heads together to make it worse, it were past our skill.”Ĭervantes contrived in volume 2 to forestall further appropriation by granting Don Quixote a “natural death.” The priest at the knight’s bedside called on a scribe to certify his demise in writing, “lest any other author but Cid Hamet Benengeli should take occasion to raise him from the dead, and presume to write endless histories of his adventures.” But burying Quixote proved as futile as Arthur Conan Doyle’s murder of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls.ĭon Quixote, like Achilles, Odysseus, Faust, and Don Juan, refuses the grave.

“Away with it,” cried the first devil, “down with it, plunge it to the lowest pit of Hell, where I may never see it more.” “Why is it such sad stuff?” said the other. In chapter 70, devils battered the presumptuous Fernández’s manuscript with tennis rackets so “that the very insides flew out of it”: Attributing its authorship, as he had that of volume 1, to the mythical Arab scholar Cid Hamet Benengeli, Cervantes exacted revenge. In 1614 the pseudonymous Alonzo Fernández de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote, prompting a furioso Cervantes to publish his own second volume of the novel a year later. While his book was selling in record numbers, Cervantes turned to short stories and pastoral poetry. Miguel de Cervantes concluded The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha in 1605 with a phrase in Italian from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: “ Forse altro canterà con miglior plettro” (Perhaps another will sing with a better pick). Keith Dewhurst, author of the play Don Quixote (1982) I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows what Don Quixote is about. Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote in the Mountains circa 1850

Rushdie quichotte review