The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World

Egginton (The Philosopher’s Desire) weaves together Cervantes’s life story with his development as a writer. Cervantes’s life was a saga unto itself: he served in the Spanish army, was kidnapped and enslaved in Algiers, became a playwright, wrote a pastoral romance, spent time in debtors’ prison, fathered an illegitimate daughter, and, while working as a tax collector, was twice excommunicated by the Catholic Church for raising revenues from them rather than from impoverished peasants. Finally, he drew from a deep wellspring of disillusion to write his ironic masterpiece, Don Quixote, late in life. Egginton shines in his literary analysis, teasing out Cervantes’s genius in accessible prose and showing how Don Quixote paved the way for modern fiction by exploring its characters’ inner lives. Compared to most literary biographers, Eggington faces a hard task: so much of Cervantes’s life story is conjectural that the biographical readings often feel tenuous. Nonetheless, this book provides an entertaining and thought-provoking reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece, and of the lesser-known rest of his oeuvre. Agent: Michael V. Carlisle and Lauren Smythe, InkWell Management. (Feb.)