Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene

Let me start with a moment in Leopoldo Duran’s Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel, Monsignor Quixote, a retelling of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, leaning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing… With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.”

The clash and the harmony between the holy and the secular, belief and make-belief, faith and entertainment, the pending death of Monsignor Quixote—a fictional character, whose Sancho in the novel is an ex-mayor, a Communist—and the pending death of Father Juan in the not too distant future: one has a sense that one enters, at that moment, the quintessential Greene-land.

For our next APS Together, I would like to read a novel that is hilarious and alarming, philosophical and dramatic, prescient and introspective—Don Quixote would be suitable, so is Monsignor Quixote. The discussion of politics, history, and dictatorship in the novel may prove important for this year.

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Join us on December 3 for a virtual discussion of Monsignor Quixote.