A Revision Update, and Revisiting Obsessions of Old VI

A Revision Update:

Thirty-three chapters (out of fifty) of The Saint of Santa Fe are now ready. Rewriting Chapter 34, I was forced to delete a scene that just wasn’t working—even though it was based on a supposedly true story. While researching the life of Father Héctor Gallego, I learned that in one of his voyages through the jungles of Veraguas, between the villages of Río Luis and Calovébora, he successfully performed an exorcism on a dying man possessed by an evil spirit. Although the man passed away soon afterward, the family was grateful that the priest had been able to eradicate whatever had taken hold of him. Upon rereading the episode, although my informants had assured me that the incident had indeed taken place, the truth read like a poorly conceived scene from a bad movie. I deemed those pages impossible to save, and I did not waste time deleting them. Sometimes, the truth can read like feebly written fiction, and in those cases, an author has no choice but to let go and hit the erase button.

An Invitation to Revisit a Posting:

I have a special relationship with Miguel de Cervantes and his novel Don Quijote de la Mancha. In fact, I am rereading the book these days; it’s like revisiting a dear friend of old.

The year 2005 marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part of Don Quijote. The surge of interest in Cervantes’s work throughout the Spanish-speaking world was truly remarkable. Yet, from my observation deck, the tributes seemed slightly askew, and I suspect the experience I chose to write about repeated itself elsewhere, not only in Panama.

I invite you to read, or reread, my thoughts regarding these occurrences in "Don Quijote de la Mancha: Four Hundred Years Later."