Don Quixote didn't care what others thought about his ideas. When is this a good quality and when it became a bad quality
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ne must live life in a genuine way, passionately, in spite of what other people think. That is the central tenet of "Don Quixote," according to Professor Ilan Stavans. Stavans is not alone in his love for that book. A few years ago, the Norwegian Academy polled 100 writers, and they voted "Don Quixote" the best novel of all time. This year, the book turns 400. In 1615, Miguel de Cervantes published part two of "Don Quixote." Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College, joins us now. Welcome to the program.
ILAN STAVANS: It's a pleasure.
SIEGEL: The "Quixote," which, I gather, is what serious literary people call the book, is the story of a Spanish gentleman taken with romances about chivalrous knights who sets out to become one centuries after such knights truly lived, if ever. What is it about that premise that is so modern and so novel in the history of literature?
STAVANS: This is a book about a man who, at age 50, has run out of ideas, probably run out of energy to live and devotes his entire life just to read. Reading chivalry novels defines his days, and at one point, his imagination runs loose and he becomes one of the heroes in one of those novels. And it is very modern and it is very urgent because of the way we connect the imagination with reality. Many of us wanted to become when we were little the superheroes that we saw on screen. And later on, when we felt in love with a novel or with a movie, those characters defined the parameters of our personality. Cervantes, at the very beginning of the 17th century, just struck luck figuring out the connection between the world of fantasy and the world of reality where we are in constant need of finding something that justifies our days.
SIEGEL: And the notion that reality can be something so subjective is also - it's a very modern idea.
STAVANS: This is the novel that invented modernity. This is the novel that teaches us that everything is subjective, that truth is relative, that each of us can have a dream and push for that dream and that we ultimately can transform the world based on that dream. That is why "Don Quixote's" such an attractive figure because people project onto him that desire to become somebody and become exceptional and transform the world. And the book is a chronicle of the adventures of this character that, in the end, is heroic in having pursued his own passion.
SIEGEL: So you - you have written a book - "Quixote: The Novel And The World" - that's about a book that's about books. It's quite a literary venture that you're into.
STAVANS: I have written a book that is about the book that has defined me as a person since I was a teenager. It is a book that has changed every time I read it. I have understood the meaning of a classic based on this many readings when I was a young man. I thought this was a book about an idealist. And now that I am the age of the character - I am in my 50s - I have concluded that it is about a middle-age crisis and it is about trying to reconnect with the dreams that you had as a young person.
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