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In a 2004 poll of many of the most celebrated living writers, Don Quixote, the seventeenth-century novel written by Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, was chosen as the greatest novel of all time. Arguably, it is the most influential novel ever written, having inspired writers as varied as Doestoevsky, Dickens, Melville, Borges, García Márquez, and Kundera, just to name a few. The images of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and Sancho Panza, his bawdy and bulky sidekick, are part of the cultural unconscious of millions of people all over the world. Works of fiction from Huckleberry Finn to the Sherlock Holmes detective stories have exploited the conceit of the foolish, reckless hero and his simpleminded but good-hearted sidekick. And yet, given the celebrity of Cervantes's masterpiece and his archetypal two main characters, the number of people who have actually read the entire novel is small. For most people in the English-speaking world, any mention of Don Quixote brings to mind the musical Man of La Mancha and the irresistible tune "To Dream the Impossible Dream."
The biographical information about Miguel de Cervantes is fairly sketchy. There are whole periods of his life about which little is known. Born in 1547 to a family whose "purity of blood" could not be proven, Cervantes lived under a shadow of being of Jewish ancestry. He held jobs—such as tax collector—that were traditionally reserved for Jews. He was denied his request for a position as a servant of the Spanish Crown in South America probably because he was not considered a "true" Christian. During Cervantes's lifetime Spain was one of the most intolerant nations in the world: all Jews had been expelled from Spain by Queen Isabel the Catholic in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus sailed on his grand voyage of discovery, and the ones who remained behind had to convert or tried to hide their religious heritage. Barely a hundred years later, all Spaniards of Arab descent were also banned from Spanish soil, even if their families had converted centuries earlier to Catholicism.
In Don Quixote, widely considered the first work of metafiction for all its postmodern innovations, which continue to inspire contemporary novelists, Cervantes addresses many of the burning issues of his time: the decadence and cruelty of the immensely wealthy Spanish monarchs and aristocrats, and the extreme poverty of the Spanish people, who were among the most destitute Europeans in the sixteenth century.
—Jaime Manrique
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1. What do you know about the period of Spanish history known as the Golden Age? What do you know about the great writers and painters that Spain produced at that time? In Don Quixote, Cervantes makes many references to the Golden Age. How does Cervantes Street depict Spain as living through a Golden Age?
2. Cervantes was a captive in Algiers for five and a half years at a time when slavery was one of the major trades in the Mediterranean and tens of thousands of Europeans were abducted by Algerian pirates who then sold them into slavery, or held them as captives for ransom. In Cervantes Street, how does Manrique depict the profound effect that Cervantes's captivity had on the writing of Don Quixote and several of his other works?
3. What do you know about the novel now called The Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha, which appeared in 1615, before Cervantes published in 1616 his long-awaited Don Quixote Part II? The author of the Ingenious Gentleman, now commonly known as "the false Don Quixote," published his novel under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a pseudonym. How did the appearance of Avellaneda's Ingenious Gentleman affect Cervantes's writing of his own Don Quixote Part II?
4. Jealousy, envy, and hatred are some of the main themes explored in Cervantes Street. What happens to the characters who allow themselves to be dominated by these emotions?
5. What do you think of Jaime Manrique's techniques of appropriating, and rewriting, portions of Don Quixote, and other works by Cervantes, and doing the same with The Ingenious Gentleman? Can you think of other writers who have used techniques of appropriation to rewrite classic works of fiction?
6. Cervantes Street is narrated by three voices. How does the author differentiate these voices? Which one is your favorite and why?
7. How is Cervantes Street relevant to our times? The subject of slavery—including sexual slavery—is also one of the novel's main themes, as well as the war to the death between the Ottoman Empire (of which Constantinople was its capital) and the Christian nations of Europe. How are these conflicts similar to the tensions that exist today between the liberal Christian west and the conservative Muslim world?
8. Is Manrique's depiction of the condition of women in Cervantes Street sympathetic? What have you learned about how women were treated at that time? Of the women in the novel, who do you think is the most fully realized, and why?
9. What do you think of Manrique's depiction of Luis Lara, a.k.a. Avellaneda, considering that he is the villain? Is Luis Lara a caricature, or is he a complex creation? Despite his malevolent spirit, does Lara hold the interest of the reader?
10.Did you find Cervantes Street engrossing, or is it a hard read? And why?