There are works that accompany us throughout our lives and at each stage reveal things that are as significant as they are different from each other.
For Antonio Muñoz Molina, those books have been ‘En busca del tiempo perdido,’ by Proust; the ‘Essays’, by Montaigne, and, naturally, ‘Don Quixote’, which came into his hands as a child rummaging through a dusty trunk in his house in Úbeda. As the boy was one of those who read “even the torn papers in the streets”, that incredible dazzling masterpiece, far from losing its lustre, is still intact six decades later.
The notes and fragments accumulated over the last ten years are now arranged and take shape in ‘El verano de Cervantes’ (Seix Barral). In addition to drawing a shy memoir in which he reveals a recent depression, he is also able to compare the adventures of the Triste Figura with Mortadelo y Filemón or the old westerns. Muñoz Molina publishes this book at the age of 69, exactly the age at which Cervantes died.
