Graham Greene's Journeys in Spain and Portugal

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 Durán. It shows how these trips provided the inspiration for Monsignor Quixote (1982), which became Greene's favourite of his own novels.

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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 Durán. 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 Priest reconstructs 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 Durán also helps us better to understand the genesis and resonances of Monsignor 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 Durán'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 establish links with Spanish socialists; or the fascinating story of a Spanish nobleman's suspicious proposal to create a Greene Foundation.

Ultimately, Greene's trips to Spain and Portugal appear as more layered and intriguing than Durán's account suggests, whilst Durán himself emerges aptly as a complex and quixotic figure--as much the protagonist of this book as Greene.