The Search for Enlightenment

One central strand follows the life of the family of Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a family of crypto-Jews in 16th-century Mexico City. It shows their attempts to live as Catholics in public, but at the same time keep their Jewish practices hidden from the Inquisition in the New World.

Another strand of the novel is about the present-day death of Rolando Pérez of Santa Fe. Pérez was researching Carvajal and apparently had stashed archival documents that could relate to Perez’s belief that his own Catholic family probably had Jewish roots.

Yet another strand features a protagonist named Ilan Stavans. That name happens to be the same as the book’s co-author. With Pérez’s cousin Irina, the fictional Stavans probes Pérez’s suspicious death; he fell off a cliff. Their probe, separate from the police’s, takes them to La Conquistadora, to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe and to 19th-century Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy.

The Stavans in the novel had come to Santa Fe to give a lecture on the area’s crypto-Jews and to see the Santa Fe Opera production of “Life is a Dream.”

Based on the early response to the novel, Stavans – the author – said he thinks the book is of interest to those wanting to know more about Jewish identity, to Jews seeking to relate to each other and to anyone interested in mysteries and in looking at history from a different perspective.

The graphic novel’s title refers to Carvajal.

“I love the graphic novel. I grew up in Mexico City reading comic strips all the time and always dreaming of having that form of literature be more accepted. It’s such an interesting mix of the written word and the image. It’s not quite novel and it’s not quite comic strip,” said Stavans, a professor of Latin America and Latino Culture at Amherst College.

	“El Iluminado – A Graphic Novel” by Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin Basic Books, $24.99, 199 pp.

“I hope the book attracts a young audience.”

The novel concludes with an arrest but the documents haven’t been located.

Stavans said he’s working on another installment with the same characters, though it’s not a sequel to “El Iluminado.”

“It starts with Cervantes but moves to Shakespeare,” he said.