Reading: Timothy West
Moderator: Harry Chapman
We start the celebrations of the fourth centenary of
Cervantes’s death with the launch of this volume,
published by Book Now, which brings together for
the first time Robin Chapman’s three novels inspired
by Don Quixote. The Duchess’s Diary tells how Maria
Isabel de Echauri, Duchess of Caparroso, comes
to believe that she has been misportrayed in fiction,
thus approaching one of Cervantes’s favorite themes,
the dialogue between reality and fiction. Sancho’s
Golden Age relates how Sancho Panza, after Don
Quixote’s death, tries to create an ideal pastoral
existence such as they had envisaged on their final
journey home. Pasamonte’s life extends a rogue’s
auto biography already in progress but left in pawn
when Don Quixote releases him from a chain-gang.
Robin Chapman is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
He is married to the painter Jill Booty. His
most recent book, Shakespeare’s Don Quixote, Book
Now 2011, is a novel in dialogue which reconstructs
Cardenio, a lost Shakespearean play based on Don
Quixote. He imagines it performed in a fringe theatre
in front of the talkative spirits of Cervantes and
Shakespeare. They find they have much in common.
He is at present working on That Red Young Man,
a literary portrait of J.B. Trend, the first Professor of
Spanish at Cambridge University and friend of Lorca
and Falla.
In English – Free entry
RSVP reservas.londres@cervantes.es
