Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale

María Antonia Garcés is one of my intellectual heroes. And her book, Cervantes in Algiers is revelatory. Evoking Freud, she discusses the way that in some people trauma is actually bypassed in the mind: it is not experienced directly and instead is registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is is very compelling.This is an award-winning book for good reason. The opening chapters on the history of Algiers and the Barbary pirates is very interesting. I don't think I have ever read this history before and aftre going through her two opening chapter twice, I learned so much.This book is very dear to me. Eye-opening on the history of the time, you will learn more than you imagine on Cervantes life. But, I would add, it is what she has to say about the life-saving grace of literature and about trauma that moved me tremendously.

This is a wonderfully researched and written account of Cervantes' time as a wounded prisoner of war, of the five years he spent as a captive, and perhaps a look into how the world became better for this. A wonderful book!

This is exactly what I wanted! The book is amazing if you want to learn the history of Algiers or of Cervantes. This book covers everything from the founding of Modern Algiers to Cervantes' captivity, along with the question: does trauma affect how an author writes? I would definitely recommend it to anyone who loves history or Cervantes.

Having taught history on the academic level for some thirty-years, this is undoubtedly one of the best books ever written in my opinion by a scholar. However, one does not need to be an expert of 16th or 17th century Spanish literature or history, to truly enjoy this masterful work.Even If you have read everything about Cervantes or nothing at all, Dr. Garces' work will encourage you to WANT to know more about this fascinating individual, as well as the time period in which he lived. It gives the reader an in-depth awakening, not only into the life of Miguel Cervantes, but also the 'cultural context' in which he and other Europeans lived, fought, and died in North Africa, as well as insight into the phenomena of the Christian 'renegades,' who aided or converted to the faith of their captors.As has been said of certain individuals, who have the personality trait or attribute to 'turn lemons into lemonade,' such was the literary genius and remarkable man we know as Miguel Cervantes.Dr. Garces has done an incredible amount of primary research, and unlike many academics, gives those unfamiliar with a given language, translations of Spanish, Latin or Arabic references or citations into English as well. Her grasp and knowledge of the Freudian or psychoanalytical approach to Cervantes' life and works are both helpful and enlightening to the reader, in an attempt to grasp the mindset of Cervantes and his decisions throughout his life, be it in Spain or North Africa.I highly recommend this volume to be a permanent member of one's personal library, otherwise your collection is definitely incomplete.

In the wake of 9/11 and our military enterprise in Iraq, Americans are asking more informed questions about the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims across the globe. Cervantes in Algiers--a magisterial exploration of the socio-political world of 16th-century North Africa--maps the surprisingly porous frontiers between Muslim and Christian worlds in the early modern period. This pioneering book minutely examines Cervantes's five-year captivity in Algiers and gauges the impact of this traumatic experience on his fiction. As Cervantes himself reminds us in the prologue to Part One of Don Quijote, his great novel was "hatched in a prison." Cervantes in Algiers rethinks the connections between trauma and creativity even as it enlightens the long and vexed history of relations between Islam and the West. A five-judge panel of the Modern Language Association of America awarded this book the 2003 James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding book in Literary Studies.