The recently recaptured drug lord Joaquín Guzmán has been given a copy of Cervantes’ classic by prison officials because he is ‘depressed and tired’

Dostoevsky called Don Quixote “the final and greatest utterance of the human mind”. Coleridge said that its author, Miguel de Cervantes, had achieved “the highest creation of genius”. Hailed as one of the world’s greatest literary works for centuries, the mock-epic Spanish novel is currently undertaking one of its biggest challenges yet: cheering up the recently recaptured drugs kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Eduardo Guerrero, head of Mexico’s prisons system, told Radio Imagen that when El Chapo was recaptured earlier this month after escaping six months ago, “he arrived depressed, and more than depressed, tired – tired of being on the run”.

In the last few days, said Guerrero, the prisoner had been given a copy of Don Quixote to read, “because we believe it is an excellent book, and we have to start giving him such notions”.

Guerrero did not say whether the drugs lord, head of the Sinaloa cartel, had started reading the 17th-century story of a would-be knight errant, which was voted the greatest book of all time by the Nobel Institute. It might not be his preferred literary genre – last week, Italian paper La Stampa reported that a copy of Italian journalist Roberto Saviano’s Zero Zero Zero had been spotted in Guzmán’s hideout. The book is an investigation into the cocaine trade, including El Chapo’s rise to power.

But at least Guerrero steered clear of handing Guzmán anything by Don Winslow, the acclaimed American crime writer who earlier this week criticised El Chapo’s Rolling Stone interview with Sean Penn. Winslow, whose novels include The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, called Penn’s interview with Guzmán “horribly misguided”, saying that it “had nothing to do with the 40-year, trillion-dollar failure that is the ‘war on drugs’ – it was instead a brutally simplistic and unfortunately sympathetic portrait of a mass murderer”, and that “Guzmán was never called to answer the hard questions”.