I remember reading Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote in secondary school and being quite impressed with myself that I could understand such a great work of literature in its original language – but I never really appreciated the nuances until I made my first trip to Spain more than ten years later.
Having recently returned from an idyllic trip to Dominica, where I made a point of making a jaunt into Roseau to see where the Dominican-born author Jean Rhys lived, I have just started reading her acclaimed Wide Sargasso Sea – a novel that won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1966 and the W. H. Smith Award the following year.
Her childhood home is now a guest house, right in the middle of the busy capital. When I jumped out of the car and dodged traffic to get just the right shot of the unassuming wooden building, people seemed to understand my interest and smiled at me as they walked just a bit more proudly down the street.
