Graham Greene's Journeys in Spain and Portugal: Travels with My Priest [Hardcover]

This expansive and compelling literary biography details the many trips to Spain and Portugal that Graham Greene took in the last years of his life in the company of his friend, the priest and professor Leopoldo Dur?n. It shows how these trips provided the inspiration forMonsignor Quixote(1982), which became Greene's favourite of his own novels.In the 1970s and 1980s, Graham Greene adopted the yearly habit of touring Spain and Portugal in the company of his Spanish friend, the priest and university professor Leopoldo Dur?n. The most outstanding fruit of these trips, almost always in summer, was the inspiration for his major Hispanic novel,Monsignor Quixote(1982), a celebration of friendship above ideological, political, or religious differences, incorporating allusions to Cervantes' famous comic novel within a critical vision of post-Franco Spain.Graham Greene's Journeys in Spain and Portugal: Travels with My Priestreconstructs each of Greene's trips through the Iberian Peninsula between 1976 and 1989, detailing their preparations, itineraries, anecdotes, companions, topics of conversation, and often surprising repercussions. Carlos Villar Flor outlines the trips' biographical importance and fills numerous gaps of documented information on this final phase of Greene's life. His detailed inquiry into Greene's Iberian adventures with Dur?n also helps us better to understand the genesis and resonances ofMonsignor Quixote, which over time became Greene's favourite of his own novels, and the subsequent television adaptation.The book also addresses incidents and aspects that, for one reason or another, never emerged in Dur?n's own account of their travels together,Graham Greene: Friend and Brother(1994). These include the possible motivations for Greene's first visit to Spain, related to his role as an informant for MI6; the mysterious visits to an old English lady located in Sintra; the writer's attempts in the early 1980s to lÃé