The 3 best books by Cervantes

First of all, I would like to show you the best edition of Don Quixote that I have been able to find. In case you are thinking of completing your library with the work of works in its best version edited by the RAE:

And having said that, let's go there with my ranking around the greatest writer this world has ever known. The literati and students of the history of literature may stone me, but what shows the universal scope of the work of Miguel de Cervantes is that the popular triumphs.

Entertainment literature, cultivated in turn with a pedagogical function, reaches more people than the most brainy, erudite and pretentious narrative. And that is the great contradiction of literature, as a representation of how human it is. Pretending to reach any reader with sophisticated forms, forced images and extremely transcendental concepts turn fictional narrative and especially the novel into classist products, and I don't think that is the most laudable intention.

Don Quixote, yes, the source from which the modern novel flows. But also a clear exponent of what the writer or critic should never do, repudiate according to what proposals because they do not reach the clarity of the concept. Any other intention limits the capacity and nature of the literary creation that aims to awaken the imagination and empathy, that unravels emotions, that can serve to delve into the richness of language. If literature is not that and it is only about launching illustrious statements, let's play something else ...

Anyway, it's my opinion. But already put, let's focus on what brings me here today, elucidate what they are for me ...

3 recommended books by Miguel de Cervantes

El Quijote

The first road novel. The journey like life. The adventures and their subjective impressions in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as the internalization of those little great everyday philosophies.

Madness as the paradoxical sensation of living under the sole reason, the knowledge of the idiosyncrasy of an entire country, the total synthesis of an entire people (yes, proverb included). And, curiously, the set turns out to be an entertaining, dynamic, satirical, emotional novel. In my book The arms of my cross, I put in the voice of a character: «Only Don Quixote gave back some light to make us see that we are crazy imagining that we live epics in our delusions».

As I say it is a quote from a character, but I certainly make it my own. The awareness of the adventure that is living needs an epic, a search for a promising, satisfying, transcendental horizon for our existence.

More than anything to make up for the only true destiny that awaits us, the prosaic ending of light in a lonely bed, at best. The only downside is that the backward leap that language implies, that is the necessary exercise to be able to enjoy the best novel in history, a slight toll to which, once accustomed, it leads you to places of the imagination never dreamed of.

Exemplary novels

Miguel de Cervantes looked into the Italian literary avant-garde of the moment to discover a way of narrating that was extremely attractive to him: the short story. And so the 12 stories that make up this volume were born.

Cervantes made the Italian short novel his own and discovered a world in which to reflect different aspects of the Spanish historical moment, of the characters who roamed that Spain between nostalgic and hopeful, where tricks of all kinds proliferated in all areas.

The story has a very considerable possibility to close with a kind of moral, and in that sense many of the stories collected here contribute that moralizing intention. Rinconete and Cortadillo or young people lost in an unjust society (does the casuistry sound familiar to you?) The colloquy of the dogs, a moving fable at times and satirical at others, with that will of personalization, in whose transmutation an awareness-raising intention always resides .

In short, a work composed of small quixotic stories that are enjoyed with the same intensity as the great novel of novels.

The works of Persiles and Sigismunda

Just as Don Quixote was a journey towards madness, through the changing settings of old Spain, this latest novel by Cervantes presents a mythological journey, full of symbols, epics and the exaltation of the human as a being capable of harboring justice. , romantic love and honest ideals (fierce comparison with the deep realistic aspects of Don Quixote that loomed derisively behind the back of the knight in the sad figure).

Persiles and Sigismunda flee for their lives from the clutches of the evil Norse prince Magsimino. They are also crown princes and their condition moves them to Rome, where they try to recover a raptured destiny.

The adventure in this case takes flight over the dusty roads that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza walked on.

The works of Persiles and Sigismunda
5/5 - (15 votes)

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