Dom Quixote

Listen to the podcast: (https://open.spotify.com/show/45is5kW...) Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/45is5kW...) | (https://www.deezer.com/br/show/2512452) Deezer (https://www.deezer.com/br/show/2512452) | (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...) Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...) There are books that are like ancient cities: inhabited by generations, traversed by obvious paths and secret trails. And there are those that are like caravels in unknown oceans, where each reader is simultaneously navigator and wind, tearing through routes that leave no trace. Don Quixote is both. A clear and fresh story – accessible even to children – and, at the same time, inexhaustible like the great human creations. Paradoxically, the strength of its message is born from the lightness of its execution. In it, contradictory forces stir: satire and lyricism; the impulse of deconstruction and the desire for transcendence; The sublime and the ridiculous. Born from a life tempered by battles, captivity, dreams of grandeur and even greater frustrations, the book absorbed the irreverence of picaresque novels, the psychological observation of humanist philosophy, and the social criticism of theater to synthesize the soul of the Spanish Golden Age, suspended between imperial glory and the melancholy of decadence, between the swan song of medieval chivalry and the dawn of bourgeois civilization. But more than a portrait of his time, Cervantes forged a mirror of the human condition. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza embody not only opposites, but complement each other in a symbolic totality – one, the embodiment of idealism that clashes with reality; the other, that of realism that humanizes the ideal. Their journey is a pilgrimage to the roots of existence, the endless dialogue of the soul with itself: the poetry of dreams and the prose of reality; the yearning for the absolute and the weight of the body; The starry sky and the dusty road. Cervantes laughs at fantasy without mocking hope; he criticizes life, but embraces its dignity, showing that when there is moral passion, even delirium can hide profound truths, and when there is none, lucidity can be the greatest of blindnesses. The laughter that dismantles illusions is the same laughter that liberates us to love the world. It is no coincidence that this is the most popular fiction of all time and the fourth best-selling book on the planet, behind only confessional works – the Bible, the Quran, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. There is not a single life that wants to be human without carrying within it something of a quixotic adventure; not a single heart that does not refuse to reduce life only to what is visible. With his Knight of the Sad Countenance, Cervantes gave flesh to the universal archetype of the man who fights for the impossible, and planted in the heart of humanity a question that will never be silenced – what is more insane: to dream of a better world or to conform to the world as it is? Guests Erivelto Carvalho: Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Brasília and co-author of *The Iberians: History, Freedom and Literature*. José Luis Martinez Amaro: Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Brasília and coordinator of the research group “Rhetoric and historiography in Hispanic literature”. Maria Augusta da Costa Vieira: Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of São Paulo and author of *Don Quixote: The Letter and the Paths*. References • Don Quixote: The Letter and the Paths; Cervantes Plural; • The Ingenious Narrative of Miguel de Cervantes: Cervantes Studies and the Reception of Don Quixote in Brazil, by Maria Augusta da Costa Vieira. • Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho), by Miguel de Unamuno. • “Miguel de Cervantes” in The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom. • Lectures on Don Quixote, by Vladimir Nabokov. • “Dulcinea Encantada”, in Mimesis by Erich Auerbach. • Cervantes in “Antibarroco”, Chapter VI, Volume II of the History of Western Literature, by Otto Maria Carpeaux. • El Pensamiento de Cervantes, by Américo Castro. • Don Quichotte, by Paul Hazard. • Cervantes or the critique of reading, by Carlos Fuentes.  • The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Used in the Modern World, by William Egginton. • Aproximación al Quijote, by Martín de Riquer.  • Don Quixote by Cervantes: a book of cases, ed. by Roberto González Echevarría.  ...