"Considered politically feeble and unimportant, why are writers then persecuted by totalitarian regimes as if they really mattered?" asks Carlos Fuentes, speaking of the Novel and of Don Quixote and of related matters in a speech given at the Internationales Literaturfestival in Berlin last year. It is a brilliant examination of literature, freedom, justice, humanity, truth.

"In praise of the novel" at openDemocracy.

Fuentes, waxing with nobly Quixotic dignity, goes on:

"We can become the slaves of hypnotic images that we have not chosen.

"We can become cheerful robots amusing ourselves to death.

"I believe that these are realities that should move us to affirm that language is the foundation of culture, the door of experience, the roof of the imagination, the basement of memory, the bedchamber of love and, above all, the window open to the air of doubt, uncertainty and questioning.

"I find, in all great novels, a human project, call it passion, love, liberty, justice, inviting us to actualize it to make it real, even if we know that it is doomed to fail."