Dec 29, 2009

The Campaign | Literary Precedents

Baltasar Bustos is a kind of Don Quixote in pursuit of chivalric adventures and of his own lady Dulcinea as well. Fuentes has said that Bustos is also modeled on Pierre Bekuzov, the plump bespectacled hero of War and Peace. Pierre is a captive of Napoleon's army in that novel, not an actual fighter in the war against the French. Bustos owes something to Voltaire's Candide, also, a seriocomic story featuring a young idealist as he discovers the real human world.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth (1989) is also about the Wars of...