This short novel is about confinement both of the mind and of the body and therefore also about liberation.Set in the last years of the 16th centuryamp160Cautivosamp160is a meditation on writing writers and creativity. Then as now Islam and Christianity were at loggerheads and women found themselves playing new roles and imprisonment or worse was societys answer to everything from murder to dissent.amp10Writeractivist Ariel Dorfman imagines for us scenes from the picaresque life of Miguel de Cervantes a man who wrestled as intensely with the contradictions implicit in writing fictionhow can one write something real if it is labelled fiction but in fact how can one write anything amp8220realamp8221 unless it is fictionamp8212as any scribbler who followed him in the centuries since. Cervantes of course was the soldier spy and adventurer who in 1605 gave the worldamp160Don Quixote often described as the first modern novel a book that has influenced Western culture perhaps more than any other book save the Bible.amp10Inamp160Cautivos we are witness to the birth of the spirit of Don Quixote de la Mancha an honorable if doomed figure whose travails mirror those of Miguel de Cervantes himself. Few writers have written more lovingly about their subjects than Cervantes wrote about his Quixote and few are better positioned to appreciate the spiritual journey of Cervantes himself than Ariel Dorfman whoamp8212not unlike Cervantesamp8212has been alternately hounded and famp234ted by those in authority.