Novel
Capítulos que se le olvidaron a Cervantes
Not translated into English
Juan Montalvo · 1895
Synopsis
A sequel to Don Quixote, taken up at an indeterminate point in the third sally, after the stay at the dukes' castle. While he waits in penance for a sign from Dulcinea, the knight hears a child crying beside a stream, has Sancho carry him and returns him to his mother in a village. There follow penitents whom he scatters, a procession he takes for a band of brigands and the tricks played on him by choirboys, in sixty chapters preceded by a long prologue in which the author says he is attempting the imitation of an inimitable book.
Context
Written in large part during the Ipiales exile, the book appeared only in 1895, six years after its author's death, in Besançon. A second, illustrated edition came out in Barcelona from Montaner y Simón in 1898; the prologue, entitled El buscapié, occupies more than a hundred pages by itself. Beneath the knight's adventures pass figures from Ecuadorian politics and jibes against the clergy. The sources diverge on the place of the action: detailed summaries set it in Spain, while the publisher Verbum says it is transposed to America.
Who it is for
In Spanish, in a language that imitates that of Cervantes; it is better to know Don Quixote, since the book assumes the text is present in the reader's mind.
Prizes and reception
Its author's only novel; the Spanish encyclopaedia Monitor saw in it the best novelistic approach to Cervantes's hero in the nineteenth century.
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