Abstract
For the Spanish writer Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910-1999) the heritage of Cervantes is something current and relevant and the novel about don Quixote is still offering many impulses even for the modern novel: the art of story telling, playing with the narrator and the characters, interpreting the reality as ambiguous and therefore living it with irony and humour. In his key novel "La saga/fuga de J.B." we find a hero called José Bastida, who has a lot of common with don Quixote.
He is not only a character, but also the narrator and, in fact, the creator of a imaginary city Castroforte del Baralla; there he invents a rich history of a couple of families and heroes, close to myths. Bastida is weak, mocked, but strong thanks to the power of words and imagination.