Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda Reading Order

Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, 1617) by Miguel de Cervantes was the last work he completed — published four days after his death in April 1616, the same month Shakespeare died — and the work Cervantes believed would be his masterpiece. Writing in the mode of the Byzantine romance (Heliodorus's Aethiopica, which Cervantes had read and loved), it follows two young northern lovers, Periandro and Auristela, on a long sea journey from the barbaric northern islands through northern and western Europe to Rome, where they finally convert to Christianity and marry. The novel is structured as a romance of trial and delay — storms, shipwrecks, pirates, abductions, cases of mistaken identity — but the delays are also occasions for digressions, tales-within-tales, and philosophical meditations on love, virtue, and the purpose of pilgrimage. The Persiles is the least read of the major Cervantes works, partly because it is the least ironic — it is a romance written in earnest belief in the genre's powers, without the satirical framing of Don Quixote. But for this reason it reveals a Cervantes invisible in the Quixote: a writer who genuinely believed in the power of literature to enact and celebrate virtue, who read Virgil and Heliodorus as living models, and who in the last months of his life was still inventing and refining. The Persiles was championed by Borges and has attracted renewed critical attention as a work of formal sophistication that its genre-romance surface conceals.