“Notions of authorship, creator, and creatures, as well as of love, folly, and imagination, dominate Rushdie’s and Dorfman’s pages as they did Cervantes’s… Dorfman’s account is more or less faithful to what is known of Cervantes’s life, but the trick of a new narrator for an old story—Pat Barker’s retelling of the Iliad by Briseis in The Silence of the Girls is a magnificent example—lets us imagine the author and his creation in new ways. Dorfman incarnates Quixote out of Cervantes’s idealization of love, betrayals by government agents, and incarceration in the dungeons of Seville.”