Cervantes Street

By Jaime Manrique

A Latinidad List Best Book of 2012

"Cervantes Street is exciting to read...Under Mr. Manrique's pen, the world of renaissance Spain and the Mediterranean is made vivid, its surface cracking with sudden violence and cruelty...This novel can be read as a generous salute across the centuries from one writer to another, as a sympathetic homage and recommendation...Cervantes Street brings to life the real world behind the fantastic exploits of the knight of La Mancha. The comic mishaps are funnier for being based in fact. The romantic adventures are more affecting. Cervantes Street has sent me back to Don Quixote.
--The Wall Street Journal

"Manrique adopts a florid, epic style for his tale of 16th-century Spain, one with the quality of a tale told by a troubadour rather than written on the page. He ably captures the human qualities of the legendary writer, as well as his swashbuckling."
--Publishers Weekly

"Manrique has penned a well-written, well-researched, fast-paced narrative ... An entertaining book ... and a superb retlling of Cervantes's life."
--Library Journal

"Cervantes Street is historical fiction at its best. Compact and intense... The characters are wonderfully draw, the environments are detailed and colorful and the feeling is genuine... a gripping, adventuresome novel with profound insight into the ways in which we choose our destiny."
--New York Journal of Books

The novel is exciting, paced well, interesting and with a literary mystery to boot.”
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Hold onto your hats because Manrique has crafted a brilliant pastiche... This fun, diverting, swift odyssey into Cervantes' travels... puts tall tales where they belong, in capable fiction... Cervantes Street should be in your hands."
--La Bloga

"A sprawling vivacious big-hearted novel. Manrique is fantastically talented and this is perhaps his masterpiece."
--Junot Díaz

The actual facts of Miguel de Cervantes's life seem to be snatched from an epic tale: an impoverished and talented young poet nearly kills a man in a duel and is forced into exile; later, he distinguishes himself in battle and is severely wounded, losing the use of his left hand; on his way back to Spain his ship is captured by pirates and he is sold into slavery in Algiers; after prolonged imprisonment and failed escape attempts, he makes his way back home, eventually settling in a remote village in La Mancha to create his masterpiece, the first modern novel in Western literature: Don Quixote.

Taking the bare bones of Cervantes' life, Jaime Manrique has accomplished a singular feat: an engaging and highly accessible take on a brilliant, enigmatic man and his epoch. This is an archetypal tale of rivalry and revengefeaturing Cervantes's antagonistic relationship with the man who would go on to write his own sequel to Don Quixotethat is sure to garner comparisons to Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, and, with its extraordinary recreation of the life and times of Cervantes, to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

Jaime Manrique is a novelist, essayist, and poet. His critically acclaimed novels include Latin Moon in Manhattan and Our Lives Are the Rivers. He is a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the City College of New York.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Sep 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781617751400

Jaime Manrique

Jaime Manrique is the award-winning author of the memoir Eminent Maricones, and the novels Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, and Colombian Gold. A contributor to Salon.com, BOMB, and other publications, he lives in New York City and is an associate professor in the MFA program at Columbia University.

Reviews for Cervantes Street

[xieouyang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read a book review where the reviewer said he'd never been able to get past the first few chapters of Don Quijote, but thought that Manrique's book was the right introduction to Cervantes' masterpiece. it piqued my interest, even though I've read Don Quijote several times in my lifetime. I am glad I went ahead and read this book.This is a somewhat true and at times very humorous narration of the life of Cervantes. The story follows the interconnected lives of two writers- Miguel de Cervantes himself and the presumed author of the apocryphal second part of Don Quijote that led Cervantes to actually write his own sequel. The lives of these two authors are told in the first person in intercepted chapters. Cervantes' known life events are told by Manrique very well, embelished vividly in many interesting ways. He captures his continuous struggles to make a living and become a successful and well known author, while often getting in trouble with the law. And Manrique invents Luis Lara, the character who writes the second Don Quijote under the name of Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda. He adds the interesting twist that both Miguel and Luis were friends in their youth, even though Luis was a nobleman while Cervantes was a commoner of (questionable) Jewish origin. But Luis comes to hate Miguel and spends the rest of his life thinking of ways to destroy Miguel.

[jasonlf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant, spellbinding from beginning to end, makes you think you're living in an extension of the universe imagined by Cervantes in Don Quixote.The book has alternating chapters. Half of them are in the first person by Cervantes and tell his life story from birth to death, focusing on his fleeing from Spain following a bar room brawl, coming to Italy, fighting in the battle of Lepanto, and his time in captivity in Algiers. Many of the elements and characters he encounters are refashioned into Don Quixote, although the persiod when he was in and out of jail and writing his masterpiece basically take place off stage.The other half of the chapters are primarily by what I believe is a fictional character, Luis Lara, a wealthy aristocrat who befriends Cervantes, ultimately becomes obsessively jealous of him, and writes the famous, false Don Quixote Part II--an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote that appeared prior to Cervantes own continuation. Luis is fascinating because he feels his greater education and literary background make him superior to Cervantes gutter humor. The final chapter is narrated by Luis's servant--which gives yet another perspective on the entire story.Cervantes Street can be read as a fast-paced adventure story, a running commentary on Don Quixote, a historical biopic, or an interesting piece of speculative fiction. The writing itself is extremely good and is sprinkled throughout with borrowing from Don Quixote and other Cervantes writing which are woven effortlessly into the original novel itself.Reading it is sending me right back to Don Quixote for a third time.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jaime Manrique's Cervantes Street (Akashic Books, 2012) is a grand old-fashioned picaresque tale with some modern twists thrown in. Manrique has ably reconstructed the Golden Age of Spain, telling the story of one the world's greatest storytellers, Miguel de Cervantes. But there's more. Manrique has created here a vicious arch-rival in Luis de Lara, a man driven by a long-ago slight to destroy Cervantes and all he creates. A very enjoyable send-up to the Quixote-esque novel.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant, spellbinding from beginning to end, makes you think you're living in an extension of the universe imagined by Cervantes in Don Quixote.

The book has alternating chapters. Half of them are in the first person by Cervantes and tell his life story from birth to death, focusing on his fleeing from Spain following a bar room brawl, coming to Italy, fighting in the battle of Lepanto, and his time in captivity in Algiers. Many of the elements and characters he encounters are refashioned into Don Quixote, although the persiod when he was in and out of jail and writing his masterpiece basically take place off stage.

The other half of the chapters are primarily by what I believe is a fictional character, Luis Lara, a wealthy aristocrat who befriends Cervantes, ultimately becomes obsessively jealous of him, and writes the famous, false Don Quixote Part II--an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote that appeared prior to Cervantes own continuation. Luis is fascinating because he feels his greater education and literary background make him superior to Cervantes gutter humor. The final chapter is narrated by Luis's servant--which gives yet another perspective on the entire story.

Cervantes Street can be read as a fast-paced adventure story, a running commentary on Don Quixote, a historical biopic, or an interesting piece of speculative fiction. The writing itself is extremely good and is sprinkled throughout with borrowing from Don Quixote and other Cervantes writing which are woven effortlessly into the original novel itself.

Reading it is sending me right back to Don Quixote for a third time.