Assault and Flattery: Don Quijote and Jaime Manrique’s Cervantes Street

Abstract

Cervantes Street (2012), a novel by the Colombian-born Jaime Manrique, pursues unanswered questions about the life and literary career of Miguel de Cervantes. One of the biggest mysteries for scholars of early modern Spanish culture has been the identity of the author of the sequel to the Part 1 of Don Quijote, published in 1614 under the pseudonym of Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda and predating the ‘legitimate’ Part 2. Avellaneda and the Avellaneda Quijote are significant for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they factor into the structure and spirit of Cervantes’ Part 2. The spurious continuation inspires Cervantes, and it inspires Manrique, who imagines a ‘historical’ Avellaneda and traces his interactions with Cervantes. Like Don Quijote, Cervantes Street is a lesson in perspectivism, in revisionist history, in psychology, and in irony. Cervantes’ family, his wife Dona Catalina, and Sancho Panza (a fellow captive in Algiers) figure prominently in the effort at gapfilling, which has a qua...