Entre las muchas razones está la que escribió Ariel Dorfman en su reseña de la novela Don Quijote de la Mancha: “In Exile with Don Quixote.” Este año se celebra el 400 aniversario de la muerte del gran autor y el señor Dorfman escribe sobre sus recuerdos de leer la novela como comunidad durante los primeros días de la dictadura de Pinochet.
Lee aquí una cita de su reseña en la que cuenta cómo Cervantes convirtió su trauma en algo fenomenal:
“this recurring experience of incarceration forced him to revisit the Algerian ordeal and put him face to face with a dilemma that he resolved to our joy: Either succumb to the bitterness of despair or let loose the wings of the imagination. The result was a book that pushed the limits of creativity, subverting every tradition and convention. Instead of a rancorous indictment of a decaying Spain that had rejected and censored him, Cervantes invented a tour de force as playful and ironic as it was multifaceted, laying the ground for all the wild experiments the novelistic genre was to undergo.
Cervantes realized that we are all madmen constantly outpaced by history, fragile humans shackled to bodies that are doomed to eat and sleep, make love and die, made ridiculous and also glorious by the ideals we harbor. To put it bluntly, he discovered the vast psychological and social territory of the ambiguous modern condition. Captives of a harsh and unyielding reality, we are also simultaneously graced by the constant ability to surpass its battering blows.”