Antonio Muñoz Molina revisits 'Don Quixote': "Now the power of lies is enormous."

The Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina sees Don Quixote as an experimental, comical and irreverent work that left its mark on universal literature, but also on his personal memory, as he tells in his new novel, El verano de Cervantes , which he presented at a press conference.

The writer, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and winner of the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, asserted that one of the major themes surrounding the legendary character of Spanish literature— the boundaries between reality and fiction —could not be more relevant.

"The human mind is very gifted at being seduced by fiction; it's very easy to trick the brain ," noted the author, who believes that contemporary challenges in this regard are unprecedented in history.

" Now the power of lies is gigantic , this is not a continuation of anything, it is something completely new and destructive and we don't know where it's going," he said, referring to certain uses of artificial intelligence and the ease with which people "lose sight of reality and become frozen in front of the screen, they forget to live."

Cervantes's Summer is an essay in its original meaning, coined by Montaigne, meaning "testing, trial." In 2016, coinciding with the commemoration of Cervantes Year , Muñoz Molina began taking notes in notebooks, the first germ of this work, which he has recovered and organized over the last year.

Throughout its pages , he interweaves memories related to his readings of Don Quixote de la Mancha with the tracing of its influence on universal literature , from Melville to Balzac, from Mark Twain to Thomas Mann or James Joyce, passing through Stendhal or Flaubert, who began to read it in children's versions.

Muñoz Molina recalled that in the house where Flaubert lived with his mother in Rouen (France), in the library that is preserved, there is a copy of Don Quixote from 1828 , a colored children's edition, and that in Sentimental Education the protagonist remembers that edition.

Stendhal read it secretly from his father , a "gloomy and authoritarian" man, according to Muñoz Molina, and he recounted that the first time he laughed after his mother's death, when he was 7 years old, was when he heard Don Quixote . "His father heard him laugh and took it away," he claimed.

In the English-speaking world, its influence was also decisive . He mentioned everything from an "almost lost" Shakespeare play based on an episode from the first part, to novelists such as Charlotte Lennox, who published The Female Quixote to great acclaim in 1750, and Jane Austen's first novel, Northanger Abbey , "completely quixotic."

On the other hand, Muñoz Molina pointed out as "one of the great Spanish paradoxes" that "this great monument of our culture remained completely ignored in Spanish literature " until the arrival of Galdós and Clarín in the second half of the 19th century, who were joined in the 20th century by authors such as Eduardo Mendoza.

More than any specific work, Cervantes has influenced Muñoz Molina's way of looking at and understanding the world . "What I learn from reading Cervantes is universal curiosity, the feeling that we should be very suspicious of all grand pronouncements; Cervantes is always ironizing."

An attitude that partly explains the cosmopolitan life of the author of Don Quixote , from his time in Italy at the end of Humanism to living and almost dying in the Battle of Lepanto, "the Normandy landing of the time", or his five years of captivity in Algiers, a huge city with people from all over.

" That complexity is one of the reasons for his talent and his instinct to poke fun at everything , even what he loves most, which is literature, and it's a great lesson for everyone, to maintain humanity and freedom of spirit and, if possible, of expression."