Carlos Fuentes
In Praise of the Novel

Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: Name the novel that you consider the best ever written. Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered, Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: works by Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and García Márquez, in that order.

The results of this consultation pose the interesting question of the long seller versus the best seller. There is, of course, no answer that fits all cases. Why does a best seller sell? Why does a long seller last?

Don Quixote was a big best seller when it first appeared in 1605 and has continued to sell ever since, whereas Faulkner was definitively a bad seller if you compare the meager sales of Absalom, Absalom (1936) to those of the really big seller of the year, Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse, a Napoleonic saga of love, war, and trade. Which means that there is no actual thermometer in these matters, even though time will not only tell, time will sell.

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CARLOS FUENTES, novelist, journalist, playwright, and essayist, is author most recently of The Eagle's Throne (2006), This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life (2005), and Contra Bush (2004).