Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura / Cervantes or the Critique of Reading
Non-fiction , 1976
Alfaguara
Pages: 160
'Don Quixote, the madman, is mad not only because he believed what he read. He is also mad because he believes, as a knight-errant, that justice is his duty and that justice is possible.'
From Zona Sagrada to Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes' narrative oscillated between narrative sobriety and the work as a jest that invaded reality to disrupt it.
In his inaugural address at El Colegio Nacional, he pointed out the similarity of totalizing works like Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
A discourse that extends, retreats, and advances in these essays that encourage us to review and reread these and other works that break reality and invent a new, alternate, and parallel one, but full of rebellion. They highlight their characteristics and make us see the world through different eyes; for example, Don Quixote before it was written, revised in its time, and throughout its existence, in its Arab and Jewish Spain and already tainted by the New World, with its real and fictional characters that emerge from other books and invade other literatures.
An incitement to rebel reading, and to rebel, with a fantasy that is better and more vital than any possible reality.