book review don quixote

Guide to the classics: Don Quixote, the world’s first modern novel – and one of the best

PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate, The University of Melbourne

Honorary Fellow, The University of Melbourne

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Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember…

This line, arguably the most famous in the history of Spanish literature, is the opening of The Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, the first modern novel .

Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, this is the story of Alonso Quijano, a 16th-century Spanish hidalgo , a noble, who is so passionate about reading that he leaves home in search of his own chivalrous adventures. He becomes a knight-errant himself: Don Quixote de la Mancha. By imitating his admired literary heroes, he finds new meaning in his life: aiding damsels in distress, battling giants and righting wrongs… mostly in his own head.

But Don Quixote is much more. It is a book about books, reading, writing, idealism vs. materialism, life … and death. Don Quixote is mad. “His brain’s dried up” due to his reading, and he is unable to separate reality from fiction, a trait that was appreciated at the time as funny . However, Cervantes was also using Don Quixote’s insanity to probe the eternal debate between free will and fate. The misguided hero is actually a man fighting against his own limitations to become who he dreams to be.

Open-minded, well-travelled, and very well-educated, Cervantes was, like Don Quixote himself, an avid reader. He also served the Spanish crown in adventures that he would later include in the novel. After defeating the Ottoman Empire in the battle of Lepanto (and losing the use of his left hand, becoming “the one-handed of Lepanto”), Cervantes was captured and held for ransom in Algiers.

This autobiographical episode and his escape attempts are depicted in “The Captive’s Tale” (in Don Quixote Part I), where the character recalls “a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra”, referring to Cervantes’s second last name. Years later, back in Spain, he completed Don Quixote in prison, due to irregularities in his accounts while he worked for the government.

Tilting at windmills

In Part I, Quijano with his new name, Don Quixote, gathers other indispensable accessories to any knight-errant: his armour; a horse, Rocinante; and a lady, an unwitting peasant girl he calls Dulcinea of Toboso, in whose name he will perform great deeds of chivalry.

While Don Quixote recovers from a disastrous first campaign as a knight, his close friends, the priest and the barber, decide to examine the books in his library. Their comments about his chivalric books combine literary criticism with a parody of the Inquisition ’s practices of burning texts associated with the devil. Although a few volumes are saved (Cervantes’s own La Galatea among them), most books are burned for their responsibility in Don Quixote’s madness.

In Don Quixote’s second expedition, the peasant Sancho Panza joins him as his faithful squire, with the hopes of becoming the governor of his own island one day. The duo diverges in every aspect. Don Quixote is tall and thin, Sancho is short and fat ( panza means “pot belly”). Sancho is an illiterate commoner and responds to Don Quixote’s elaborate speeches with popular proverbs. The mismatched couple has remained as a key literary archetype since then.

In perhaps the most famous scene from the novel, Don Quixote sees three windmills as fearful giants that he must combat, which is where the phrase “tilting at windmills” comes from. At the end of Part I, Don Quixote and Sancho are tricked into returning to their village. Sancho has become “quixotized”, now increasingly obsessed with becoming rich by ruling his own island.

Don Quixote was an enormous success, being translated from Spanish into the main European languages and even reaching North America. In 1614 an unknown author, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, published an apocryphal second part. Cervantes incorporated this spurious Don Quixote and its characters into his own Part II, adding yet another chapter to the history of modern narrative.

Whereas Part I was a reaction to chivalric romances, Part II is a reaction to Part I. The book is set only one month after Don Quixote and Sancho’s return from their first literary quest, after they are notified that a book retelling their story has been published (Part I).

The rest of Part II operates as a game of mirrors, recalling and rewriting episodes. New characters, such as aristocrats who have also read Part I, use their knowledge to play tricks on Don Quixote and Sancho for their own amusement. Deceived by the rest of the characters, Sancho and a badly wounded Don Quixote finally return again to their village.

After being in bed for several days, Don Quixote’s final hour arrives. He decides to abandon his existence as Don Quixote for good, giving up his literary identity and physically dying. He leaves Sancho – his best and most faithful reader – in tears, and avoids further additions by any future imitators by dying.

The original unreliable narrator

The narrator of Part I’s prologue claims to write a sincere and uncomplicated story. Nothing is further from reality. Distancing himself from textual authority, the narrator declares that he merely compiled a manuscript translated by some Arab historian – an untrustworthy source at the time. The reader has to decide what’s real and what’s not.

Don Quixote is also a book made of preexisting books. Don Quixote is obsessed with chivalric romances, and includes episodes parodying other narrative subgenres such as pastoral romances , picaresque novels and Italian novellas (of which Cervantes himself wrote a few ).

Don Quixote’s transformation from nobleman to knight-errant is particularly profound given the events in Europe at the time the novel was published. Spain had been reconquered by Christian royals after centuries of Islamic presence. Social status, ethnicity and religion were seen as determining a person’s future, but Don Quixote defied this. “I know who I am,” he answered roundly to whoever tried to convince him of his “true” and original identity.

Don Quixote through the ages

Many writers have been inspired by Don Quixote: from Goethe, Stendhal, Melville , Flaubert and Dickens, to Borges , Faulkner and Nabokov.

In fact, for many critics, the whole history of the novel could justifiably be considered “ a variation of the theme of Don Quixote ”. Since its early success, there have also been many valuable English translations of the novel. John Rutherford and more recently Edith Grossman have been praised for their versions .

Apart from literature, Don Quixote has inspired many creative works . Based on the episode of the wedding of Camacho in Part II, Marius Petipa choreographed a ballet in 1896. Also created for the stage, Man of La Mancha , the 1960s’ Broadway musical, is one of the most popular reimaginings. In 1992, the State Spanish TV launched a highly successful adaptation of Part I . Terry Gilliam’s much-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is only the most recent addition to a long list of films inspired by Don Quixote .

More than 400 years after its publication and great success, Don Quixote is widely considered the world’s best book by other celebrated authors. In our own times, full of windmills and giants, Don Quixote’s still-valuable message is that the way we filter reality through any ideology affects our perception of the world.

The headline of this article was updated on August 10 to clarify that Don Quixote is considered the first “modern” novel, not the first novel.

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Don quixote, common sense media reviewers.

Art and emotion both lost in retelling of classic.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

People taunt and torment Don Quixote because he is

A surprising amount of violence for a book filled

Some mild swearing: "scumbag," "dam

A reference to an ice cream brand.

Parents need to know that there is a surprisingly high level of violence for a book that looks like it's for middle graders. Most of it is played for laughs, but it involves severe beatings with serious and lasting injuries.

Positive Messages

People taunt and torment Don Quixote because he is mad.

Violence & Scariness

A surprising amount of violence for a book filled with pictures. Most of it is played humorously, but involves severe beatings, blood, knocked-out teeth, broken limbs, stabbings, split heads, and other serious injuries. A mention of a heart being cut out of a dying man, and of men hanged from trees.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Some mild swearing: "scumbag," "damn," "ass," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Where to read, community reviews.

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What's the Story?

An old Spanish man in the 1500s becomes obsessed with books on chivalry, loses his mind, and decides he is a knight errant. Convincing a peasant neighbor to accompany him as his squire, he travels around the countryside, wearing an old suit of armor and riding a nag, attempting feats of knighthood that are mostly in his imagination. While doing so, some of those he meets, hearing about his insanity, play a variety of tricks on him, some amusing and some cruel.

Is It Any Good?

This is a peculiar, if well-intentioned, effort. Illustrated retellings for children of classic adult literature is a large and controversial genre: some think that they take away the pleasure of discovering the real thing later in life, while others believe that it enriches their childhoods. But whichever side you fall on, this one is indeed a very strange concept for a children's book. Start with a story in which the main characters are a deranged old man and his middle-aged sidekick, neither likely to appeal to children. Take nearly 350 pages of often very formal prose, with a few weird anachronisms thrown in, to retell it, and do so in a way that enhances the insanity while leaving out any sense or emotional involvement the original might have had. You end up with a story whose only appeal is the occasional bits of slapstick humor and nonsense.

Stranger still was the decision to hire a brilliant illustrator, Chris Riddell, who created a wealth of hilarious illustrations, which the book designer then hid, for the most part, behind opaque blocks of text, so that only bits of them are peeking out. This is a large, handsome volume, with pictures on nearly every spread, printed on heavy, glossy stock, and the price reflects this. But they have done a disservice to the illustrator, and chosen and rewritten the story in a way that will have limited appeal to its target audience.

From the Book: Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and abstinence on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, sometimes squab as a treat on Sundays -- these consumed three-fourths of his income. The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. He had a housekeeper past forty, a niece not yet twenty, and a man-of-all-work who did everything from saddling the horse to pruning the trees. Our gentleman was approximately fifty years old; his complexion was weathered, his flesh scrawny, his face gaunt, and he was a very early riser and a great lover of the hunt. Some claim that his family name was Quixada, or Quexada, for there is a certain amount of disagreement among the authors who write of this matter, although reliable conjecture seems to indicate that his name was Quexana. But this does not matter very much to our story; in its telling there is absolutely no deviation from the truth.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about retellings of classic stories. Do you think it's a good idea? Why or why not? Have you read any before? Did you like them? Why do you think writers and publishers create them?

Book Details

• Author : Martin Jenkins
• Illustrator : Chris Riddell
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Candlewick Press
• Publication date : April 1, 2009
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 10 - 14
• Number of pages : 347
• Last updated : July 12, 2017

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Author Interviews

'don quixote' speaks to the 'quality of being a dreamer'.

NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Ilan Stavans about his book, Quixote: The Novel and the World. Stavans was inspired by the Miguel de Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote, which turns 400 this year.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Book Review: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

August 23, 2016 By Jessica Filed Under: Book Review 1 Comment

Don Quixote

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances, that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray – he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants – Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote generally has been recognized as the first modern novel. The book has had enormous influence on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible."

Don Quixote has the humor of Nacho Libre and a weird blend of fantasy and reality that I can only compare to Galaxy Quest .  I. Loved. This. Book.  I was surprised how funny it was.  Like laugh-out-loud funny with crude potty humor (my favorite) and violence that the Three Stooges would love.  For example, Don Quixote does something absolutely crazy until I can’t stand him but then he gets the crap beaten out of him so I felt sorry for him and kind of liked him again until, of course, he does something crazy again.  It actually takes a while to get tired of that cycle because it manages to be funny every time.  By the time I was tired of it, Don Quixote started to change and develop more.  The story is tragic, too, so it has some depth (but even the tragedy manages to be kind of funny).

If you read this novel in high school and feel like you didn’t read the same book as me, YOU DIDN’T.   You need to read the Edith Grossman translation.  It’s amazing.  It flows well.  It’s modern enough to understand yet she worked hard to keep as much of the context of the time period and language as possible.  The style feels similar to reading Jane Austen.  It’s not totally modern but not old enough that it’s hard to understand.  Edith’s footnotes in this novel were great.  They gave context when needed.  They pointed out plot holes that I didn’t even notice like someone in the room talking even though the author never mentioned them coming in.  She also did her best to explain the word play humor that sadly didn’t translate to English.  If you’re still not convinced to read it because it’s long, I can tell you that the reason it’s so long is because there are chivalric novellas inserted into the narrative.  They’re good stories but if you are intimidated by how long it is, you could skip these novellas.

If Don Quixote was going to be written today, it would be about video games rotting someone’s brains and they tried to bring the rules of video games into real life.

This is how the book describes Don Quixote:

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. -Cervantes, (translated by Edith Grossman). Don Quixote (p. 21). 

So Don Quixote decides to become a chivalric knight after he loses his mind.  His family is shocked by this and asks a priest for help.  This priest goes through Don Quixote’s books to “help” him by getting rid of the evil ones. At first, I thought they were just going to burn them all.  But as the conversation goes on, the priest starts to justify keeping some of the books he likes in long speeches.  I almost died laughing at the hypocrisy of it.

There are several characters who are trying to “help” Don Quixote but they do it by pretending to believe everything Don Quixote says and does.  Doesn’t that make them just as crazy as Don Quixote? Since the characters are pretending to go along with Don Quixote, it makes it so his imagination is literally influencing the plot.  I’m also pretty sure he would have been “cured” sooner if they had left him alone and let reality teach him.  The characters who are helping him are a judge, a priest and a barber which sounds like the perfect setup for a joke.  “A judge, a priest and a barber walk into an inn…”

By part II, I started to wonder if maybe Don Quixote has a point.  That maybe the world needs knights/heroes who go around the world doing good.  Maybe we are the ones that are crazy to think that the world is fine the way it is and we don’t need to try and make it better even if we are aiming for an ideal that we can’t reach.  At the very least, I started to admire his determination to do what makes him happy no matter what anyone else says.

The plot consists of random, unrelated events which usually bugs the crap out of me.  But what kept me reading was the desire to know if this new, random event would finally be the thing that knocks some sense into Don Quixote.

I love the characters in this book. Sancho Panza is awesome.  He was by far my favorite character.  I imagined him kind of like this:

He reminds me of Nacho from Nacho Libre.  He’s the source of most of the humor.  I could hardly breath when Sancho has “done something with my person I shouldn’t have (p. 148).”  I won’t spoil it but basically it’s totally immature bathroom humor.   It’s written in such lovely language to contrast the crude humor that it’s literally the funniest thing I’ve ever read .

Don Quixote and Sancho don’t always get along and it was immensely entertaining to read.  Don Quixote gets mad at Sancho’s logic quite frequently.   Sancho tries to sound wise by saying every proverb he’s ever heard whether it applies to the situation or not.  He also likes to switch his words around like in this next quote (and it makes Don Quixote really mad lol):

“ Censuring is what you should say,” said Don Quixote, “and not sentencing , you corrupter of good language, may God confound you!” – Cervantes (translated by Edith Grossman). Don Quixote (p. 579). 

Sancho is also a little bit of a Captain Obvious and states obvious things which annoys Don Quixote and made me laugh.   Still, the great thing about Sancho is that despite his nonsense, his simple-mindedness often appears wiser than Don Quixote which make them a great, contrasting pair.

My favorite thing about the movie Galaxy Quest is that the characters have to live through the ridiculous science-fiction that you see in shows like Star Trek in real life.

Don Quixote is like that, too.  He tries to imitate the highly stylized and totally unrealistic life of a knight in real life.

There are poems at the beginning that are easy to skip, but don’t.  Or at least listen to them on audiobook.  They are written in a style where some of the syllables are missing and it’s hilarious.  Having it read out loud sounds like someone getting punched in the gut halfway through each line.   The poems are also the first example of this weird mix of fantasy and reality.  The poems are stories of the real characters in Don Quixote talking to famous characters from other chivalry novels.

In Part II, the characters in the book have read Part I and the fact that they’ve read Part I influences what they do in Part II.  The characters react to the real life reception of the novel when they meet characters who have read it.  And the characters they meet are both fans and critics.  It’s so bizarre and fun and it works.

Cervantes claims to be re-writing a translation of someone else’s story about Don Quixote so the author becomes a character in his own book .  The priest, when he is going through Don Quixote’s books, finds one written by Cervantes and says it’s a good book.  THIS IS SO WEIRD I LOVE IT.  Also in Part I, Cervantes wrote a few plot holes that are addressed in Part II.  Cervantes doesn’t just clarify them.  He has the characters themselves explain the plot holes and be mad that the author didn’t keep an accurate history.

Cervantes made a lot of references to real chilvaric novels throughout the book.  I could tell that Cervantes really knew what he was making fun of.  But by the end of the book, I still couldn’t tell if that meant he loved chilary novels or hated them.   I think that’s a sign of brilliant satire.

Don Quixote refuses to eat because he’s trying to emulate knights from the books he’s read and it never mentions them eating.  This is so funny I can’t even….

I learned so much from reading this book.  Like did you know that Don Quixote is considered the first modern novel? And it inspired Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce and Prouse?   Part I has chapter breaks according to the events in the novel but Part II develops into the traditional novel where the chapter breaks are based on the emotions of the characters.  We get to hear more often what the characters think (I got that from Sparknotes just FYI).

Just to add to the nerdiness of this review, here are a few other interesting tidbits that I learned from Sparknotes about Don Quixote (aka stuff you could rip off for a book report):

• There’s actually quite a bit of Spanish history in the novel.
• This novel challenged the idea of class and worth making it revolutionary for it’s time.
• There are books everywhere in the novel and they show the power that books and ideas can have in our lives – for good or bad and regardless if they are fiction or not.
• Don Quixote as a character is likable yet hate-able at the same time.  He has good intentions but he still hurts others.
• Cervantes disagrees with the fake translator on whether Don Quixotes’ actions were good or not leaving it up to the reader to decide.
• The writing style sounds like a transcription of an oral history sometimes.  One of the themes in Don Quixote is story-telling and Cervantes likes to mess around with all kinds of story formats – poems, epic, novels, oral stories etc.

Now let’s talk about feminism which does actually exist in this book.  A bit.  Don Quixote meets a girl who is so beautiful that a man claims that he “has” to fall in love with her and she has to return his love or he will die.  Yeah she calls BS on that one on goes on her happy, independent way.  Sadly, the rest of the female characters are flat and valued only by their looks but it’s hard to tell if this was part of the satire or not… I mean every other female character in the book is sooooooo beautiful.  Too many drop-dead gorgeous ladies without personalities to keep track of.  Blech.

The audiobook was fantastic.  I switched back and forth between the audiobook and ebook.  The voices that the narrator did were so good that they got stuck in my head even when I was reading the ebook.

In the prologue, Cervantes describes what the perfect novel should do:

…move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it. -Cervantes, (translated by Edith Grossman). Don Quixote (p. 8). 

In other words, the best books should:

..achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. -Cervantes, (translated by Edith Grossman). Don Quixote (p. 414). 

It’s the perfect description of the perfect novel and I think Don Quixote lives up to that.

PS. The Ending  View Spoiler » At the end, on Don Quixote’s tombstone, it says: “for it was his great good fortune to live a madman, and die sane (p. 939).” Wow. That’s kind of deep. Does it mean that complete sanity is so sad that it’s best only to experience right before you die? Also, it was sad that Don Quixote died.  But it made sense.  For him to be sane it would go against who he is and if he stops being who he is it’s kind of the same as dying. « Hide Spoiler

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About Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel  Don Quixote  is often considered his magnum opus, as well as the first modern novel.

It is assumed that Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares. His father was Rodrigo de Cervantes, a surgeon of cordoban descent. Little is known of his mother Leonor de Cortinas, except that she was a native of Arganda del Rey.

In 1569, Cervantes moved to Italy, where he served as a valet to Giulio Acquaviva, a wealthy priest who was elevated to cardinal the next year. By then, Cervantes had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment and continued his military life until 1575, when he was captured by Algerian corsairs. He was then released on ransom from his captors by his parents and the Trinitarians, a Catholic religious order. He subsequently returned to his family in Madrid.

In Esquivias (Province of Toledo), on 12 December 1584, he married the much younger Catalina de Salazar y Palacios (Toledo, Esquivias –, 31 October 1626), daughter of Fernando de Salazar y Vozmediano and Catalina de Palacios. Her uncle Alonso de Quesada y Salazar is said to have inspired the character of Don Quixote. During the next 20 years Cervantes led a nomadic existence, working as a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada and as a tax collector. He suffered a bankruptcy and was imprisoned at least twice (1597 and 1602) for irregularities in his accounts. Between 1596 and 1600, he lived primarily in Seville. In 1606, Cervantes settled in Madrid, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616.

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• Classics Club

August 23, 2016 at 10:52 am

Wow! I’ve never heard of anyone raving about this book as much as this. I’ve always wanted to read Don Quixote, but it is one of those books that really intimidate me.

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BOOK REVIEW: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

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DON QUIXOTE is among the earliest novels, and – owning to its humor and thought-provoking story – it continues to be one of the world’s most important literary works. The book tells the tale of a Spanish gentleman, Alonzo Quixano, who has a combination midlife crisis and breakdown of sanity that result in his adoption of the new name Don Quixote de La Mancha (a.k.a. Knight of the Rueful Countenance, and [later] Knight of the Lions) and his setting off as a knight errant (i.e. a roving warrior in search of adventure, competition, and opportunities to be virtuous / chivalrous.) We are told that this breakdown is the culmination of obsessive reading of books on Chivalry. These books were the pulp fiction of the time: low-brow, sensationalist, and – to the scholarly-minded — pointless. A recurring debate throughout the book is whether these books are harmful and should be avoided or whether they are a harmless amusement that may even have benefits. For Don Quixote, they are neither; he sees them as a truthful depiction of how knights live an behave.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Don Quixote makes two journeys away from his village in La Mancha. The first trip is short-lived, beginning with some preliminaries before he can strike out as a knight. A handy series of delusions help set events in motion. In his mind, an old broken-down horse becomes “Rocinante” (a regal knight’s steed.) A beautiful farmgirl who he has never met becomes the Lady Duclinea del Toboso – object of his affections [unbeknownst to her.] Finally, an innkeeper becomes the King who Don Quixote asks for knighthood [which the bewildered innkeeper bestows upon the deranged old man.] Shortly thereafter, Don Quixote takes his first beating and is taken back home.

During this time period, his concerned staff and neighbors burn all his books on Chivalry, but that has little impact [possibly because he’s already read all the books and knows them by heart] and soon Don Quixote is riding out on his second sally — this time with his squire, Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is able to face quite a number of ignominious adventures during this outing, including his famous charge on the windmills – which he sees as giant arm-swinging monsters. [From whence the turn of phrase “tilting at windmills” derives to describe the behavior of charging into a futile and ill-advised battle with an illusory enemy.] At the end of the first part, Don Quixote is dragged back to his village by the curate and the barber (two men interested in saving Don Quixote from his madness.) Believing he is under an enchantment, Don Quixote is able to be returned home with minimal kicking and screaming.

Part two of the book continues the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as they again leave their home village. It’s worth noting that Cervantes presents this work as if it were a book within a book – in other words, as if he’s presenting collected tales of the life of Don Quixote as they were presented in other volumes. This creates some amusing instances of the literary equivalent of fourth wall breaking. I found that the second part did feel different from the first. Whereas, part one comes across as a conglomeration of tales, a through-flow of story is more apparent in the second part. The two parts weren’t released together, and so there is probably good reason for this besides a literary decision to change styles. The second part has been said to be more reflective – rather than pure farce – and that makes sense as Cervantes had about a decade to ponder what he wanted to say. Much of the second part revolves around the activities of a Duke and Duchess who prank Don Quixote. By this time, the first volume of Don Quixote’s exploits has been in publication for a while and the “knight errant” is well-known as a madman and a buffoon.

Pranking both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is a challenge as the two men are quite different in their vulnerabilities. The Duke and Duchess can use suggestion to exploit Don Quixote’s inclination to mentally conjure grandiose, romantic scenarios. However, Sancho Panza is of sound mind and has a kind of pragmatic insightfulness and so they must – instead — exploit his lack of sophistication and cowardice. The Duke gives Sancho Panza governorship of an island – something that Don Quixote has been promising he would give his squire as soon as some King or Queen saw fit to reward him for his virtuous service as a knight errant – which, of course, is not forthcoming. Sancho rules for only ten days before his hunger and cowardice reach their limits in the face of: first, a doctor who puts him on a calorie-restrictive diet for the health benefits; and, second, a mock attack on his island.

The book ends after a second battle with a disguised Sanson Carrasco. Carrasco, far from the knight seeking fame that he pretends to be, is a villager from La Mancha who wants to see Don Quixote return home to get well. He “battles” Don Quixote once as the Knight of Mirrors about midway through the book, but is defeated (more through a combination of his own inexperience and bad luck than as a result of Don Quixote’s skill.) On this second occasion, he fights as the Knight of the White Moon and defeats Don Quixote – who is forced by the dictates of the wager to return home. At first, Don Quixote plays like he might try out the shepherd’s life for a year, but soon he falls into a funk. Before he dies, he reclaims the name Alonzo Quixano and acknowledges that he’d been out of his mind and that all of his adventures in knight errantry were a farce.

Returning to the question of whether the chivalry books are harmful and should be avoided at all costs or whether they are entertainment with some redeeming features, the reader is really left leeway to conclude as he or she sees fit. It’s worth noting that this wasn’t a new question. Plato and his most famous student, Aristotle, argued this same question. Plato believed that all these exciting stories could do is incite people to violence and other unproductive endeavors. Aristotle believed that there could be catharsis (purging of emotions) through dramatic works.

At first blush, it might seem clear to the reader that Cervantes is saying that these works are detrimental. He proposes that they, literally, dried out Don Quixote’s brain and turned him into a madman. However, one might come to feel differently as one sees the influence that Don Quixote has on people. While everyone recognize that he is a madman, most also recognize that he has a sort of wisdom and courage about him. He stands for virtuosity, even if he doesn’t have the power to back it up with weapons that he imagines he does. Sancho Panza also has a sort of wisdom, and one suspects that this sagacity has increased through his exposure to Don Quixote. For the brief time that Sancho Panza is governor, he makes some sound decisions and he never exploits his position to his own gain. While none of the battles of Don Quixote amount to much, people are moved by his advice and his virtuous example.

This is a hard book not to love. I will admit to thinking that — particularly in Part one –it could have benefited from an editor, but given its seminal literary position, it’s hard to give this criticism much weight. [What I mean by it is that there are numerous repetitive examples of Don Quixote mistaking one thing for another and getting into an unwise fight throughout the first part, few of these scenes are anywhere near as effective as the relatively early ‘tilting at windmills’ scene. Therefore, there is a bit of tedium in these scenes.] That said, the book is witty is places and laugh-out-loud funny in others, and it offers philosophical food-for-thought while never being overbearing in the process. If you read fiction, you should definitely read this book.

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Critic’s Take

In Exile With ‘Don Quixote’

By Ariel Dorfman

• Oct. 7, 2016
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Of the myriad times since adolescence that I have returned to the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, there is one I choose to remember — that I cannot help but remember — as we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes. That reading, in October 1973, took place among a distraught group of captive men and women who, like me, had sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Santiago, Chile, after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende.

In an atmosphere in which a thousand future exiles were suffocating in rooms designed to host cocktail parties, I joined a group of some 30 refugees who were reading it aloud together. Conceived as a sort of literary therapy to fight depression among us, I soon discovered that these readers had much to teach me. Many of them had come to our country from the failed revolutions of other Latin American lands, had been locked away for prolonged periods of time, and suffered torture and banishment. They instinctively understood Cervantes, who like them had been the victim of astonishing adversity and had become immensely resourceful in a cruel and disenchanted world.

Indeed, the defining experience of Cervantes’s life was the harrowing five years starting in 1575 that he spent in the dungeons of Algiers as a prisoner of the Barbary pirates. It was there, on the border of Islam and the West, that Cervantes came to appreciate the value of tolerance toward those who are radically different, and it was there he discovered that of all the goods men can aspire to, freedom is by far the greatest. While awaiting a ransom that his family could not pay, confronted with execution each time he attempted to escape, watching his fellow slaves tormented and impaled, he longed for a life without manacles. But once he returned to Spain, a crippled war veteran neglected by those who had sent him into conflict, he came to the conclusion that if we cannot heal the misfortunes that assail our bodies, we can, however, hold sway over how our soul responds to those sorrows.

“Don Quixote” was born of that revelation. In the prologue to Part 1 of his novel he tells the “idle reader” that it was “begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound makes its home.” Whether that jail was in Seville or in Castro del Río, this recurring experience of incarceration forced him to revisit the Algerian ordeal and put him face to face with a dilemma that he resolved to our joy: Either succumb to the bitterness of despair or let loose the wings of the imagination. The result was a book that pushed the limits of creativity, subverting every tradition and convention. Instead of a rancorous indictment of a decaying Spain that had rejected and censored him, Cervantes invented a tour de force as playful and ironic as it was multifaceted, laying the ground for all the wild experiments the novelistic genre was to undergo.

Cervantes realized that we are all madmen constantly outpaced by history, fragile humans shackled to bodies that are doomed to eat and sleep, make love and die, made ridiculous and also glorious by the ideals we harbor. To put it bluntly, he discovered the vast psychological and social territory of the ambiguous modern condition. Captives of a harsh and unyielding reality, we are also simultaneously graced by the constant ability to surpass its battering blows.

Those of us reading “Don Quixote” in 1973, in an embassy we could not leave, surrounded by soldiers ready to transport us to stadiums and cellars and, ultimately, cemeteries, responded viscerally to the novel. That continuous exaltation and practice of liberty, both personal and aesthetic, was inspiring. This faith was epitomized by a passage from Part 2 of “Don Quixote” that moved us to tears.

Sancho Panza has been made governor of a fictitious island by a frivolous duke. The lowly squire proves to be a far wiser and more compassionate ruler than the noblemen who mock him and his master. One night, doing the rounds, he comes upon a young lad who is running away from a constable. The boy gets cheeky, and the ersatz governor sentences him to sleep in prison. Infuriatingly, the prisoner insists that he can be put in chains but that no one has the power to make him sleep: Staying awake or not depends on his own volition and not on anyone else’s commands. Chastened by the lad’s independence, Sancho lets him go.

It is an episode that has stayed with me. If I recall it now, it is because I feel it contains the essential message Cervantes still has for today’s desperate humanity.

True, most of the planet’s inhabitants are not in prison, as Cervantes so often was, nor do they find themselves confined within walls, like the revolutionaries in the Argentine Embassy. And yet we live, as if captured, in a time of violence and inequality, greed and stupidity, intolerance and xenophobia, marooned on a planet spinning out of control — like lunatics sleepwalking toward the abyss.

Cervantes died 400 years ago, and yet he continues to send us words — like the wisdom of that boy threatened by Sancho Panza — that we need to meditate upon before it is too late. Nobody has the power to make us sleep if we don’t wish it ourselves. Cervantes is telling us that our besieged, besotted, captive humanity should not lose hope that we can awaken in time.

Ariel Dorfman is the author, most recently, of “Feeding on Dreams.”

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“Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Review)

Don Quixote is one of those truly weighty classics that one know something about even if one has never worked their way through the 1000 plus pages that make up the two books telling the tale of the worthy, though slightly mad Don and his faithful Sancho.

Since this book was written in the 1600s it has a long and storied history in the annals of literature. Of course, it is translated from Spanish so it is bound to lose something in translation (maybe even from 1600s Spanish to modern Spanish?) but since my language skills are poor I don’t have a choice unfortunately.

There is also quite the history to Quixote of which I was unaware prior to reading the book and researching it a little. It covers the wanderings (quixotic having entered the lexicon) of the titular character and his long suffering sidekick and squire Sancho Panza. The book is in two parts, written a decade apart although they are basically of a similar ilk. The cover Quixote’s obsession with chivalry and knight errantry that he learned from reading books. It is strongly implied, especially in the second half, that Quixote is mad. There is quite the evidence to suggest this throughout (tilting at windmills, seeing all inns as castles) the narrative but it is more up front in part 2.

Cervantes seems to really admire Quixote and is always writing about his good heart. Panza, too, is given sympathetic treatment and is quite the comical character although, of course we are seeing the wise fool versus the foolish wise man. The literary style of the novel has been commented upon by people a lot more erudite than me but it is very interesting, interspersed as it is with sub stories (including the introduction of another widely used term in “Lothario”) that sometimes cover a lot of ground in their own right.

The wanderings are long and frankly, sometimes I was rather lost in the lengthy descriptions of events but the development of the relationships is fascinating and well explained, but wow, it takes a lot of time to work through this novel. However that seems to be true of all such epic novels and I am glad that I made the effort and I feel more able to understand the terms that have made it into common usage as a result of the influence of this novel. It takes some reading though!

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

DON QUIXOTE

The new translation by gerald j. davis.

by Miguel de Cervantes translated by Gerald J. Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2012

Split between old and new, this translation seeks a niche audience.

This new translation of the beloved classic attempts to return to the roots of its earliest English translation.

With numerous English translations of  Don Quixote already in existence, any new translator will have much to prove. Davis’ ( Jungle of Glass , 2011) translation results from his attempt to preserve “the voice of the [Thomas] Shelton translation,” the earliest Quixote in English, in order to give a contemporary audience the sense of how the 17th-century masterpiece originally read. Even though Shelton translated the second part of the novel, Davis neglects it, which may disappoint some readers, as Cervantes provides some of his most piercing psychological and philosophical insights in the sequel. In Davis’ rendering, the register ascends above most current translations, preferring “a seventeenth century sensibility” over readability for a contemporary audience. This stylistic choice leads to stilted prose, especially in dialogue, where Davis provides the characters with lofty affectations informed by antiquated etiquette. That’s not to say, though, that this edition reaches the syrupy decadence of Peter Motteux’s early translation. Thus, Davis’ Quixote hovers between eras, neither transforming Cervantes’ novel into plain, current English nor infusing it with full-on Spanish Golden Age textures. The compromise attempts to harness the best of both eras, although the result can sometimes feel disjointed and ignorant of Cervantes’ dry sarcasm. The most readable passages occur during action scenes (even when the action takes place in Quixote’s imagination), where Davis deftly navigates the text, often with great gusto. His translation bypasses literalism, freely rearranging syntax and diction, and his arrangements create a colorful atmosphere and flavor, though some scholars may disagree with the mild poetic liberties he has taken. With so many translations available, Davis’ Quixote provides a unique path through the work, which, though it remains incomplete, should find a readership in those interested in the gaps between the language of Cervantes’ time and ours.

Pub Date: May 3, 2012

ISBN: 978-1477401194

Page Count: 362

Publisher: Lulu

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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BOOK REVIEW

by Miguel de Cervantes ; translated by Edith Grossman ; edited by Roberto González Echevarría

JUPITER STORM

by Marti Dumas illustrated by Stephanie Parcus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2017

In more ways than one, a tale about young creatures testing their wings; a moving, entertaining winner.

A fifth-grade New Orleans girl discovers a mysterious chrysalis containing an unexpected creature in this middle-grade novel.

Jacquelyn Marie Johnson, called Jackie, is a 10-year-old African-American girl, the second oldest and the only girl of six siblings. She’s responsible, smart, and enjoys being in charge; she likes “paper dolls and long division and imagining things she had never seen.” Normally, Jackie has no trouble obeying her strict but loving parents. But when her potted snapdragon acquires a peculiar egg or maybe a chrysalis (she dubs it a chrysalegg), Jackie’s strong desire to protect it runs up against her mother’s rule against plants in the house. Jackie doesn’t exactly mean to lie, but she tells her mother she needs to keep the snapdragon in her room for a science project and gets permission. Jackie draws the chrysalegg daily, waiting for something to happen as it gets larger. When the amazing creature inside breaks free, Jackie is more determined than ever to protect it, but this leads her further into secrets and lies. The results when her parents find out are painful, and resolving the problem will take courage, honesty, and trust. Dumas ( Jaden Toussaint, the Greatest: Episode 5 , 2017, etc.) presents a very likable character in Jackie. At 10, she’s young enough to enjoy playing with paper dolls but has a maturity that even older kids can lack. She’s resourceful, as when she wants to measure a red spot on the chrysalegg; lacking calipers, she fashions one from her hairpin. Jackie’s inward struggle about what to obey—her dearest wishes or the parents she loves—is one many readers will understand. The book complicates this question by making Jackie’s parents, especially her mother, strict (as one might expect to keep order in a large family) but undeniably loving and protective as well—it’s not just a question of outwitting clueless adults. Jackie’s feelings about the creature (tender and responsible but also more than a little obsessive) are similarly shaded rather than black-and-white. The ending suggests that an intriguing sequel is to come.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-943169-32-0

Page Count: 212

Publisher: Plum Street Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018

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by Marti Dumas

BROTHERS IN ARMS

Bluford high series #9.

by Paul Langan Ben Alirez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2004

A YA novel that treats its subject and its readers with respect while delivering an engaging story.

In the ninth book in the Bluford young-adult series, a young Latino man walks away from violence—but at great personal cost.

In a large Southern California city, 16-year-old Martin Luna hangs out on the fringes of gang life. He’s disaffected, fatherless and increasingly drawn into the orbit of the older, rougher Frankie. When a stray bullet kills Martin’s adored 8-year-old brother, Huero, Martin seems to be heading into a life of crime. But Martin’s mother, determined not to lose another son, moves him to another neighborhood—the fictional town of Bluford, where he attends the racially diverse Bluford High. At his new school, the still-grieving Martin quickly makes enemies and gets into trouble. But he also makes friends with a kind English teacher and catches the eye of Vicky, a smart, pretty and outgoing Bluford student. Martin’s first-person narration supplies much of the book’s power. His dialogue is plain, but realistic and believable, and the authors wisely avoid the temptation to lard his speech with dated and potentially embarrassing slang. The author draws a vivid and affecting picture of Martin’s pain and confusion, bringing a tight-lipped teenager to life. In fact, Martin’s character is so well drawn that when he realizes the truth about his friend Frankie, readers won’t feel as if they are watching an after-school special, but as though they are observing the natural progression of Martin’s personal growth. This short novel appears to be aimed at urban teens who don’t often see their neighborhoods portrayed in young-adult fiction, but its sophisticated characters and affecting story will likely have much wider appeal.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004

ISBN: 978-1591940173

Page Count: 152

Publisher: Townsend Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2013

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by Paul Langan

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Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote in the Mountains circa 1850

I don’t think I understand what Don Quixote is about, and I don’t think anybody knows what Don Quixote is about.

—Keith Dewhurst, author of the play Don Quixote (1982)

Miguel de Cervantes concluded The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha in 1605 with a phrase in Italian from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso : “ Forse altro canterà con miglior plettro ” (Perhaps another will sing with a better [guitar] pick). While his book was selling in record numbers, Cervantes turned to short stories and pastoral poetry. In 1614 the pseudonymous Alonzo Fernández de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote , prompting a furioso Cervantes to publish his own second volume of the novel a year later. Attributing its authorship, as he had that of volume 1, to the mythical Arab scholar Cid Hamet Benengeli, Cervantes exacted revenge. In chapter 70, devils battered the presumptuous Fernández’s manuscript with tennis rackets so “that the very insides flew out of it”:

“Away with it,” cried the first devil, “down with it, plunge it to the lowest pit of Hell, where I may never see it more.” “Why is it such sad stuff?” said the other. “Such intolerable stuff,” cried the first devil, “that if I and all the devils in Hell should set their heads together to make it worse, it were past our skill.”

Cervantes contrived in volume 2 to forestall further appropriation by granting Don Quixote a “natural death.” The priest at the knight’s bedside called on a scribe to certify his demise in writing, “lest any other author but Cid Hamet Benengeli should take occasion to raise him from the dead, and presume to write endless histories of his adventures.” But burying Quixote proved as futile as Arthur Conan Doyle’s murder of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls.

Don Quixote, like Achilles, Odysseus, Faust, and Don Juan, refuses the grave. Novels, dramas, operas, poems, movies, paintings, and sculptures resurrect him and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, in every century. In the twenty-first, it is the turn of Ariel Dorfman and Salman Rushdie. Despite drawing from the same source, the two American-resident exiles have produced very different novels, whose charms might just spare them Cervantes’s flames of eternal damnation.

Notions of authorship, creator, and creatures, as well as of love, folly, and imagination, dominate Rushdie’s and Dorfman’s pages as they did Cervantes’s. Who conceived Quixote and Sancho? The nonexistent Benengeli? Cervantes? Or Pierre Menard, Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional early-twentieth-century scholar who was so obsessed with Cervantes that he set out to reproduce word for word “the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of part 1 of Don Quixote and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter.” Borges, in truly Borgesian fashion, delivered a capricious judgment: “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.” Cervantes, through intention or accident, invited not only imitation but absurdity.

The key to Quixote’s and Sancho’s enduring appeal may lie in an observation by Dr. Arthur Brock, the Scottish psychiatrist who treated the World War I poet Wilfred Owen for shell shock at the Craiglockhart War Hospital:

Sancho Panza and his romantic crack-brained master were perhaps less “thought out” by Cervantes than they were direct offsprings from his sub-conscious mind. Like the vivid symbols of dream-life, the creations of genius are really too good to be merely, or even mainly, intellectual products.

In Dorfman’s novel, Cautivos , Quixote springs straight out of Cervantes’s unconscious on October 31, 1580, when the future author “sank to his knees on the beach in Valencia and kissed the ground, that was it, that was the moment chosen for me [Quixote] to emerge from oblivion.”

Cervantes quotes Cid Hamet Benengeli, “For me alone was the great Quixote born, and I alone for him,” whereas Dorfman’s Quixote thinks, “Without Miguel de Cervantes, I was nothing.” Cautivos is the biography of an author by his character. Cervantes has escaped to Valencia from five years of slavery, torture, and humiliation in Algeria, unaware of the fictional being observing him in hope of being written into full existence. Although Cervantes is a wounded hero of Spain’s victory over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, Spanish officials greet him with suspicion, interrogation, and further captivity. The interrogators Marín and Garrido and their notary, Carrasco—an “unholy trinity”—lead him to a hovel on the beach to demand proof that he did not cooperate with his Moorish captors. He remains silent before his inquisitors, much to the invisible Quixote’s discomfort.

Marín, calling Cervantes “Miguelito,” dismisses him like a servant. The proud aristocrat rounds on his accusers, unwrapping letters from Christian cautivos (captives) in Algiers that he has promised to deliver to their families. He then relates in fury the story of his imprisonment and escape attempts, concluding, “Did your notary, this Carrasco, write it all down?” Readers of Cervantes will recall that a certain “bachelor,” Samson Carrasco, claimed to Sancho Panza that he and not Cid Hamet Benengeli wrote the first book of Don Quixote , a claim for which Quixote punishes him. Marín and Garrido beg Cervantes’s “pardon for doubting his blood heritage and making lewd, absurd, nasty insinuations.”

The purpose of their questions was to determine his suitability for a mission to North Africa to spy on the Ottoman fleet. Quixote listens, fearing that his author’s life and thus his own will be snuffed out. Cervantes accepts, but his real goal is to see Zahara, the beautiful married Algerian woman he loves, and bring her to Spain. In Algiers, disguised as an Arab, he learns that the sultan’s ships are heading east to face the Persians, information he will take to Spain after seeing Zahara. Their lovemaking inflames Quixote—his first, somewhat shocking, exposure to carnality. Zahara refuses to leave Algiers, and a distraught Cervantes asks, “What can I do without you by my side?” Quixote tells us, “She responded with the one word I had been hoping to hear…‘Write.’” His story, he realizes, will be told. On Cervantes’s return to Spain, though, he is cast into prison in Seville. It is there that he hears the prisoners’ stories and reads them books of chivalry that will one day become the basis of his masterpiece, causing Quixote to reflect, “Only then do I understand that this is the best possible thing in the whole world that could have happened to us.”

Dorfman’s account is more or less faithful to what is known of Cervantes’s life, but the trick of a new narrator for an old story—Pat Barker’s retelling of the Iliad by Briseis in The Silence of the Girls is a magnificent example—lets us imagine the author and his creation in new ways. Dorfman incarnates Quixote out of Cervantes’s idealization of love, betrayals by government agents, and incarceration in the dungeons of Seville.

In Quichotte , Rushdie moves Cervantes’s tale from seventeenth-century Spain to the contemporary United States (pop. 331,883,986). (He provides population figures for the towns his Quixote—here called Quichotte—visits, one of many running jokes, like calling certain roadways and motels “historic.”) Quichotte is a transplanted Indian from Bombay whose name, Smile, is an Americanization of Ismail. Rushdie laces so many allusions and jokes into the novel that “Ismail” may refer to Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” and Ahab’s mad quest for the whale, which parallels Smile’s pursuit of an idealized woman. Or not. As the original Quixote’s lunacy derived from overconsumption of popular chivalric fables, Smile, “on account of his love for mindless television, had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms watching an excess of it.” For Smile, like Peter Sellers (a bogus Indian in more than one film) as Chauncey Gardiner in Being There , television is reality. His Dulcinea is Salma R. (Salma Regina?), a luscious starlet from his native Bombay, a brown Oprah Winfrey hosting a witless daytime reality show in New York, and an opioid addict. His “infatuation which he characterized, quite inaccurately, as love” prompts him, while listening to a recording of Jules Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte , to become Mister—feeling himself unworthy of the title Don—Quichotte, determined to win her through heroic deeds.

His cousin and employer, pharma tycoon Dr. R.K. Smile, arrives in a private jet to fire him from his job as a traveling drug salesman. The meeting takes place in a motel in “Flagstaff, Arizona (pop. 70,320).” Quichotte takes his sudden unemployment as fortuitous, telling his cousin, “I’ve got plenty to do. I’ll just drive.”

His Rocinante is an “old gunmetal grey Chevy Cruze” in which he sets off alone toward New York and Salma R. During a meteor shower near Moorcroft, Wyoming (pop. 1,063), a teenage boy miraculously materializes in the Cruze’s passenger seat. He is Sancho, the son Quichotte has lacked in a long and loveless life:

“My silly little Sancho, my big tall Sancho, my son, my sidekick, my squire! Hutch to my Starsky, Spock to my Kirk, Scully to my Mulder. BJ to my Hawkeye, Robin to my Batman!…”

“Cut it out, ‘Dad’,” the imaginary young man rejoined. “What’s in all this for me?”

Quichotte and Sancho embark on that familiar trope of American myth, the road trip, through a dystopian landscape. That’s just the first chapter. In chapter 2, Rushdie reveals that Quichotte is a fictional character in a novel being written by another Indian émigré from Bombay, who uses the nom de plume Sam DuChamp for his series of third-rate spy novels, called Five Eyes. Resisting the obvious reference to Marcel Duchamp, whose Portrait (Dulcinea) was exhibited in Paris in 1911, Rushdie has DuChamp’s readers “calling him Sam the Sham, like the ‘Wooly Bully’ guy, who drove to his gigs in a Packard hearse.”

The Quichotte book that DuChamp—whom Rushdie calls “Brother” rather than give him a “real” name—is writing is more than a novel within the novel. It is also a parallel story to DuChamp’s own: he and his protagonist share a birthplace, age, race, class, failings, naiveté, immigration status, and quest. DuChamp/Brother speculates, in Rushdie’s fusion of real and fictional, that his and Quichotte’s parents may frequent the same clubs. Brother’s and Quichotte’s stories unfold in alternating chapters, in which Quichotte gradually unhinges his creator. Far from purging his existential anxieties, writing about Quichotte came “close to triggering a flight response” in Brother. From his spy stories, he knew that “you can run but you can’t hide.” Rushdie, the author of both characters, opines, “Maybe writing about Quichotte was a way of running away from that truth.” Or, in Rushdie’s case, toward it—via the madness of men turned into mastodons in New Jersey, portals to other worlds, and, well, the apparent end of the universe. The author as creator can also be destroyer, and Rushdie toys with both.

“Outlining the plot of a Rushdie novel is a futile exercise in a brief review,” wrote the novelist Allan Massie in The Scotsman when Quichotte came out in Britain. The problem is no different in a long review, perhaps because Rushdie confronts the reader with a multiplicity of plots. It’s like a Marx Brothers movie, easier to enjoy than to analyze. Quichotte could be Pynchon on acid, except that Pynchon was on acid. This is the America of Gore Vidal’s comic novel Duluth , in which characters appear, disappear, and reappear as characters in the television series Duluth , written by one Rosemary Klein Kantor, who calls her plagiarism of other works “creation by other means.” Rushdie’s Quichotte lives in “The Age of Anything-Can-Happen,” and pretty much everything does. Sometimes things happen twice, first to Quichotte and then to DuChamp.

Dorfman and Rushdie both faced the prospect of murder by vicious regimes. Dorfman’s criticisms of Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet put him at risk of sharing the fate of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier, assassinated by Pinochet’s agents in 1976 in the supposed sanctuary of the United States. Rushdie received a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in the famous fatwa against The Satanic Verses in 1989. It is little wonder that both were drawn to a tale by a seventeenth-century Spanish political prisoner whose own life was often in jeopardy.

The interplay between author and character—Cervantes and Quixote in Cautivos , Brother and Quichotte in Quichotte , not to mention between Rushdie and Dorfman and their dramatis personae—touches on a theme Georges Simenon treated in Maigret’s Memoirs (1951). Twenty years after publishing Pietr the Latvian , the first of seventy-five Maigret romans policiers , Simenon allowed illustrious Jules Maigret of the Police Judiciaire his own say. When Maigret meets Simenon, he observes his “hint of a Belgian accent” and questions whether “my investigations as told by him were more convincing—he may even have said more accurate—than as experienced by me.” Simenon rejects Maigret’s charge of gross misrepresentation: “The whole problem is to make something more real than life. Well, I’ve done that! I’ve made you more real than life.” But Maigret has had an effect on Simenon, telling his creator, “Do you know that with the course of time you’ve begun to walk and smoke your pipe and even to speak like your Maigret?”

Rushdie and Dorfman are unlikely to walk and speak like their Quixotes, but each has delved deep into the Knight of La Mancha’s soul to understand and perpetuate his enduring allure. Rushdie’s Quichotte is less mad than the humans-become-mastadons who are as incomprehensible and frightening to their neighbors as Donald Trump’s devotees are to the uninitiated. Dorfman’s cautivo sees his creator, like Maigret sees Simenon, more clearly than Cervantes sees himself. Both novels, like their model, are riddles to be deciphered in myriad ways.

Cervantes, Borges, Dorfman, and Rushdie would undoubtedly concur with Yogi Berra: “When you get to the fork in the road, take it.”

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Don Quixote

By miguel de cervantes.

'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes tells the story of the eccentric Alonso Quixano, a man in his mid 50s, whose love for chivalric romantics leads him to assume the function of a knight-errant as he goes out on a noble quest to prove his valor to the world by reviving the culture of gallant horse-riding.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

The book is both tragic and comedic and follows the struggles of Alonso Quixano whose adventure goes to prove that sometimes setting and following your dreams, against society’s expectations, is the most worthwhile thing to do. 

‘Spoiler-Free’ ‘ Don Quixote ‘ Summary

‘ Don Quixote ‘ is a classic written by Miguel de Cervantes documenting the adventure of Alonso, a fifty-year-old and native of La Mancha, a suburb of Spain. Influenced by the heroic deeds portrayed in countless chivalric books he has read, Alonso decides to become a hero himself and must set out to restore order to a world that, in his opinion, needs saving from the hands of evil entities and people who oppress the poor.

All set for his journey, he changes his name to the more suitable ‘ Don Quixote ‘, buys a horse, and selects a young farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, and a peasant young girl – who he calls Dulcinea – as his lady for the journey. He begins his journey and arrives at a public inn but he prefers to think of this place like a castle.

In the inn, he meets with all kinds of people including prostitutes and the innkeeper. He realizes it’s getting late and he must pass the night at the inn, but Alonso can’t seem to stay out of trouble for too long that by the end of the night, he fights a group of drivers before leaving by the morning.

As the journey continues, Alonso meets and rescues a young male applicant who appears to be getting some maltreatments from his lord. Later, our protagonist soon gets the beating of his life after he accosts a team of traders and questions them for saying unpleasant things to his lady, Dulcinea. He is taken home to recuperate but while he’s at it, his niece arranges with a group of locals and destroys his library and the books in it.

Alonso is told a wizard is responsible when he finally comes to consciousness. With eyes set on the quest, Alonso resumes his journey taking along Sancho, his squire. Things quickly get feisty and his valor is tested in an epic, but comical, battle against the windmills only he mistakes them for giants.

He soon encounters a lady marching with friars and seeks to rescue her. He and Sancho then enter another inn but brew trouble that leads to them leaving with injuries. Alonso loses lady Dulcinea and tries to get her back but is met with a stern test that threatens his knight-errantry. He must defeat the knight of the white moon or risk resignation from his chivalric adventures.

‘ Don Quixote ‘ Summary

Spoiler alert: important details of the novel are revealed below.

‘ Don Quixote ‘ begins with Alonso’s obsession with books of valor and chivalry. He keeps a stockpile of them and does nothing but reads them all day. Because of excessive exposure to the books, he loses his mind and decides he can become like one of the heroes in the books to save the helpless and rid the world of all impending evil.

He baptizes himself with a new name – ‘ Don Quixote de la Mancha ‘ – a locality in old Spain and gathers a team for his adventure which includes; his horse Rocinante, and a poor farm girl he renames Dulcinea, the love of his life.

Donning an old, worn-out knightly suit, ‘ Don Quixote ‘ begins his journey of saving the world and proving his knight-errantry. Their first real stop is an inn crowded with prostitutes and the innkeeper, but he prefers to see this place like a castle filled with ladies and lords. He decides there’s no better place so he organizes to be knighted here.

His first test as a knight comes too quickly as he rescues a young boy from his master’s brutality, but soon gets beaten up to stupor by a mob of traders who barely know the first thing about knight-errantry.

‘ Don Quixote ‘ is forced back home to recover, and while he lies unconscious, his friends and family – pioneered by his niece, a barber, and a priest – gather and burn all his books to ashes because they fear these objects may have been the reason for his madness which almost took his life.

When he finally awakens to the reality of losing his precious books, he is left without a choice but to blame it on the works of evil wizardry, which is known to be the mortal enemy of all knight errant such as himself. Undistracted from the goal of his quest, he recruits Sancho Panza as his squire and begins his second journey.

As they make progress in the sally, ‘ Don Quixote ‘ is faced with perhaps the most epochal battles in straight successions that, in fact, define his knightly adventure. First, wrestles with many giants which, in reality, are mere windmills.

Next, he’s up against a herd of enchanters who he pictures as ill-tempered muleteers, and then makes trouble with a passing congregation of friars who, in his mind, are good for nothing abductors holding an innocent young lady captive.

Throughout the entire journey, ‘ Don Quixote ‘ and his team are insulted, made jest of, and beaten by everyone who encounters them simply because of their antisocial ways of doing things.

Not all of their deeds are bad and ridiculous, for example, they one time have to save a company of prisoners but instead of getting a “thank you” they instead are pelted with stones. Still, they go on to do a couple of things noble and worthy of a gallant knight-errantry, like helping several estranged lovers find love again, or parleying enemies who were former acquaintances.

Also, attending the funeral of a man, they say, who was killed by his love for a shepherdess – is another highlight of ‘ Don Quixote’s ‘ second adventure. But at this point, his friends and family are worried about him and are trailing closely at him. By the end of part one, ‘ Don Quixote ‘ is snatched and put into a cage and shipped back home by his friends, a barber, and a priest, who imagine they can cure his madness.

Here, we find ‘ Don Quixote ‘ to be a year older and more tranquil than he’s ever been, and the reason for that is partly because he had been bedridden for a while since his friends caged and brought him home against his wish. Notwithstanding, he prepares and sets out for his third journey and soon finds out, through a student called Carrasco, that his journeys so far have been recorded in popular chivalric history books.

‘ Don Quixote ‘ and his squire, Sancho Panza, are popular by now, but he must reunite with his lady, Dulcinea. However, after he and his squire conduct a wild search, they discover that such a person doesn’t exist and that the closest thing to her they find is Aldonza, a peasant girl, who no doubt is no match for the exquisite princess-like figure he had in mind. Sancho tries to convince him but he doesn’t buy it. 

They are back on the road again to face a trying battle with a forest knight, who is in fact a disguised Carrasco. The reason for this fight is for young Carrasco to try and trick ‘ Don Quixote ‘ to resign on the quest and return home, but with Quixote emerging as the winner, he is left to continue his journey.

Quixote and his squire will go on to enjoy several trips uninterrupted and filled with exciting experiences such as attending a wasteful wedding ceremony, playing guests at the home of an unusual gentleman, and exploring the Montesinos – a place which Quixote is convinced has magical powers.

Quixote and Sancho soon come to this land where everybody – including the Duke and Duchess – idolizes them because they had read from the chivalry history books the thrilling adventures of their previous sallies. They are treated well by the royalty and enchanters, but this is only a mere trick engineered to explore and goad Quixote about his missing Dulcinea.

Quixote is impressed with Sancho’s loyalty and role in his journey and promises to gift him an island when all is done. The Duke hears of this and seeks to isolate  Sancho from his master and maybe gain his loyalty and trust (but with a real intent to humiliate him), so he makes Sancho a ruler of a small country expecting to make a mockery out of his rule.

Sancho disappoints the Duke and ruled with wisdom like a pro, but soon abdicates to return back to his master, Quixote, because the responsibility set by the Duke is becoming more like a punishment.

The two travelers continue their journey encountering people of different cities and cultures, one of them being a noble thief, and another – an affluent man from Barcelona. They soon face a big fight with the white knight – a disguised Carrasco – for the second time, and to proceed on the journey,  Quixote must win the fight. Unfortunately for them, Sampson Carrasco defeats Quixote so they must return home to the village.

On their way home, Quixote obviously doesn’t take the outcome of his defeat very lightly, as he worries he may have lost every hope of finding and reuniting with his precious Dulcinea. By the day, he becomes unhappy and later depressed. On getting home, Quixote becomes heavily sick and falls into a deep sleep only to wake up and denounce his knight-errantry, claiming he is no crazier.

He urges his family and friends to no longer refer to him as ‘ Don Quixote ‘ but by his real name Alonso Quixano. After this confession, he passes away.

What is the main lesson from the book ‘ Don Quixote’ ?

The main lesson passed by Cervantes through his book ‘ Don Quixote ‘ is that society is not always right, and sometimes individuals should believe in themselves and pursue their goals regardless of social convention.

Did ‘ Don Quixote ‘ really go mad in the book?

Yes, he does go mad as a result of overindulgence in chivalric romances, according to Cervantes the narrator. Quixote’s madness can be likened to present-day paranoid delusional, as he holds his judgment dear to heart and doesn’t trust or believe anybody else’s.

What part of his adventures is considered more interesting?

‘ Don Quixote ‘ completed several great adventures, however, the part where he battles with three windmills in the mindset that they are human giants is not only very interesting but also hilarious and exciting.

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About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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Windmills of the mind

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes , translated by Edith Grossman 980pp, Secker and Warburg, £20

In 2002 I took part in a Norwegian book club poll of 100 authors from all over the world to find the "best and most central works in world literature". Don Quixote was first of the selected 100 books, with 50% more votes than any other book. Was the novel selected because the writers felt a primitive love and attachment to the story and characters, or were they making a historical judgment about its importance as the first real novel?

The British television director, Mike Dibb, made a wonderful documentary in 1995 about the pervasive presence of the Don in modern life, from kitsch to high culture, from kitchen tiles to Picasso. Readers' reviews on Amazon of previous translations include accounts of transforming reading experiences and tributes to the life and warmth of the tale. There are also cavils and grumbles about narrowness and repetitions. Edith Grossman's new and fluent translation gives us another chance to think about the book's persisting life.

Part of its technical charm for writers is the way in which it is the ancestor both of realism and of very modern self-conscious metafictions. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza grow more real as they suffer and discuss. They have real bodies in a real landscape and an almost-real society. Once you have met them you can never forget them. Any discussion of the invention of character in prose fiction radiates round Cervantes. Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac would not have written as they did without him.

But writers both before and after modernism have been excited by the way Don Quixote mediates between many ways of storytelling. The comic realist tale is played against the high chivalric vision and mediaeval romantic forms - and feelings. The novel includes inserted sentimental novellas, and develops a peculiar self-consciousness in the second part, as Quixote and Panza bump into people who know them intimately because they have read the first part. There is also play with an unauthorised second part, which did appear, to Cervantes' irritation, which his characters have also read, and seek to refute.

In the second part there are several characters who are bent on having 17th-century fun by staging romantic episodes for Quixote to take part in, to amuse themselves - lovelorn maidens, false knights, fake enchantments. The knight becomes the victim of others' plotting - and the reader is both uneasy and glad at the end when the invented "author", Cid Hamete, is described as thinking that the "deceivers were as mad as the deceived and that the duke and duchess came very close to seeming like fools, since they went to such lengths to deceive two fools..."

The power of the novel (and of all novels, but most particularly of this one) lies in the need to imagine people and things that don't exist. In that sense Quixote's desire for the world to be a place of extreme adventures, concerned with high moral virtues and chaste sexual passion, is a version of every human need to make the world more real and more meaningful through the unrealities of art. Cervantes' peculiar skill lies in the way in which he delightfully confuses his own readers by writing about enchanted windmills and wineskins, magic helmets and barbers' basins. We have all used the equivalent of a basin to turn ourselves into a character in a tale.

The interplay between this unreality and the imaginary reality of the world Quixote travels through depends on the rendering of the solidity of master and servant - Quixote's "sorrowful face", his broken teeth, his dirty chamois underwear and even Sancho Panza's stink when he is driven to relieve himself while standing on guard beside the knight at arms. The mind wanders freely, the body gets battered. Until Panza finds a way to disenchant Dulcinea by simulating the lashing of his own body by lashing saplings in the dark.

Nabokov, famously, came to hate the novel because of the cruelty of the world in which it was set - the remorseless beatings of Sancho and Quixote, the children putting furze under the horses' tails to drive them wild. He thought Cervantes shared his age's indifference to suffering, and indeed a modern reader reacts differently to japes and humiliations.

Dostoevsky, on the other hand, made a subtle identification of the Don's battered, patient, sorrowful countenance with Christ himself, despised and rejected of men. He said Quixote was the most perfect attempt in Western literature to represent a "positively beautiful man". He added that "he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous", and went on to say that his nearest rival was Mr Pickwick, "weaker as a creative idea but still gigantic". The human way to present goodness and beauty, Dostoevsky thought, was through humour - arousing compassion by ridicule. Out of his perception of Quixote came his idea for the character of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot who, like Quixote, does a lot of damage through pure idealism. This tells us something about the hybrid comic nature of the novel in general.

Kafka, in his parable, The Truth About Sancho Panza combines an understanding of the riddle about reality and unreality with an understanding about those wandering pairs in western literature - Prince Hal and Falstaff, Faust and Mephistopheles, Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste and his master. All of them are aspects of an internal dialogue inside one man: idealism against scepticism, honour against expediency, this world against a hypothetical other world, heaven or the golden age. Kafka's Panza fed his "demon" on romantic tales, called him Quixote and loosed him into the world, where his exploits - which would have hurt him had he stayed inside Panza - "harmed no one" and could be observed with pleasure. Another use of Cervantes' archetypes to make a subtle definition of the uses of art.

In terms of self-conscious fiction, the most perfect of all is Jorge Luis Borges's Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, which uses and adds to the conceit of the text within, and the text seen through, by having Menard create a modern Quixote, set in the 20th century. His story is identical word for word, but they are all now 20th-century words with 20th-century meanings. This is a riddle about writing and reading.

Quixote's death is moving because it is the end of storytelling, as well as of a life force. Those who have tricked him into homecoming try to bring him to life by reigniting his fantasy with news of Dulcinea. His resolute, even irritable, refusal to re-enter his imaginary world or to resume his chivalric identity have a wonderful combination of dignity (for the man) and real loss (for his friends and the reader). It is a new twist in the tension between the real and the imagined.

Edith Grossman's translation has been described as a masterpiece. It has energy and clarity, and she has invented a robust style which is neither modern nor ancient. There are some infelicities. She has a recurrent habit of making the Don confound the second and third persons - thou thinketh, he thinkest - which seems implausible on the surface as he knew the chivalric language by heart. I thought she might be using the device to represent some other error in his speeches.

I have checked with Spanish scholars and writers and they say that Quixote makes no such error, and that, at least in the passages I showed them, it is introduced where he is speaking eloquently and well. The translation does not make a reader stop to think about stylistic felicities, or word play, or levels of incongruity, and I suspect there has been a loss there, partly inevitable. But it is readable - it does not constantly draw attention to itself as translation - and the rhythm of the telling is compelling.

· AS Byatt's Little Black Book of Short Stories was published by Chatto last year

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Book Review: “Don Quijote” by Miguel de Cervantes

Everyone who meets Don Quijote is amazed that one and the same person can be so wise and well spoken regarding most things and so completely insane when it comes to chivalry and the deeds of knight-errantry. Really a sensible old country gentleman, he has had his head turned by “books of chivalry”—romances about the apocryphal acts of apocryphal knights, their quests and amours, their saintly virtues and their military exploits. At times it seems possible that he has deliberately chosen to set aside reason, to make a break with the modern world, and at hazard of looking like a lunatic, to pursue the ideals of a time that has long passed, if it ever was. He’s like the original template of the fanboy who gets himself up as a Klingon and insists on acting and speaking like a Klingon, even after the fan convention leaves town. Maybe he’s a danger to himself and others. Maybe he’s a harmless fool. Maybe his protest against the unromantic pragmatism of modern life will be heard. Or maybe his plight is a protest against the poison of romance. Spin your interpretation as you will, what happens to Don Quijote and his talkative, rustic squire Sancho Panza is so funny that you may hurt yourself laughing.

Don Quixote sallies forth to become a knight, and begins his adventures by mistaking a country inn for a castle, the attending prostitutes for fair ladies, and a peasant wench for his ideal beauty, the Lady Dulcinea. After a few adventures in which he accomplishes little except being drubbed within an inch of his life, he returns to his estate to recover. Although his niece, housekeeper, barber, and priest try to cure his madness by burning his books of chivalry, he sneaks out on a second sally, aided and abetted by the plump peasant Sancho: one clad in tarnished armor and mounted on a swaybacked horse called Rocinante, the other astride an ass with the descriptive name of Dapple.

At first Sancho is the voice of reason, pleading with his master to believe that he is tilting not at giants but at windmills, or that he is entering an inn rather than a castle. But soon he enters into the shared delusion, enticed by promises of a reward like being made governor of an island. Neither of them, however, is entirely above deception, as Sancho shrewdly fools his master into believing that Dulcinea has been enchanted to look like a coarse country girl, and Don Quixote fabricates (and thereafter really believes) a fantastic experience in an enchanted cave. Enchanters and enchantments multiply around them, always a ready fallback to explain why something looks like other than what the silly pair believe it to be. And so they persist in acting out their joint fantasy, even while passersby gape at them in amazement, or sometimes run away in fright; even, indeed, when some of their adventures cost them bruises and scrapes and broken teeth, to say nothing of terror, exhaustion, hunger, and humiliation.

Some of the knight-errant’s friends conspire together on how to bring him home and cure him of his mania. One attempt that succeeds, for a time, involves a cage in which they convince Don Quixote that he has been confined by magic. Still, he makes a third sally, again with Sancho in train, intending to win a suit of armor at a jousting tournament in Saragossa. But his plans go all awry, and after many more adventures—some of them instigated by a Duke and Duchess who are having fun at his expense—the great knight meets his match, goes home in defeat, and comes to his senses at last. His adventures end in a way that, while not altogether happy, best serves the author’s stated purpose of destroying those hated books of chivalry.

I have not mentioned one tenth of the strange things Don Quixote and Sancho Panza do in this book. Besides crossing paths with characters who have their own stories to tell—embedded vignettes that make the first half of the book an especially varied patchwork of melodramas and adventures—they make serious, though misjudged, attempts to assist the oppressed and afflicted. So Don Quixote frees a gang of prisoners who have been sentenced to the galleys, attacks a religious procession, comes off worst in several battles, and actually wins a few. In blithe disregard of reality and his own safety, he tilts at stampeding cattle, leaves Sancho to suffer for an unpaid debt, and is persecuted by an amorous servant girl. Sancho, meanwhile, gets a taste of an island governor’s life and doesn’t like it. Even less does he like being sentenced to 3,300 self-administered lashes, which are required to release Dulcinea from her enchantment. As the story matures from a sequence of farcical episodes to a deeply thoughtful, yet equally funny, meditation on themes of deception and self-deception, a novel takes shape that is not only a great work of art, but also a grand piece of entertainment.

Thirty-one CDs of David Case reading the English translation of this classic Spanish novel proved a rule that I have long embraced. Yes indeed, the Audiobook is an enchantment that turns books that you feel guilty about not having read—though not guilty enough to read on your own—into a pleasure that you would gladly repeat. I had so much fun listening to the late Mr. Case read this book that I’m actually tempted to read it with my own eyes, on paper or Kindle. It isn’t the dry, plodding, attention-span-defying mess of antiquated manners, unfamiliar words, and over-the-head literary devices that one might expect of a novel published four hundred years ago in another language. And even though the incidents everybody knows are in it, such as the tilting-at-windmills gag, are loaded at the front end of the rather long novel, it never runs out of hilarious and romantic incidents to savor and remember. Perhaps everyone knows about the windmill scene because that’s as far as most people have read, if they’ve tried reading it at all. Or perhaps it’s because it’s the first of a series of incidents so funny and droll that they changed the world. Don Quixote does many things equally mad, equally out of step with his time, equally driven by his willful delusion of being a chivalric knight-errant—in a word, quixotic —and tilting at windmills stands for all of them.

You heard right. Don Quixote changed the world. It frequently tops the list of the greatest novels, or works of fiction, in any language. It did for the modern Spanish language what Shakespeare and the King James Bible did for English. (Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: Cervantes and Shakespeare died one day apart, on April 22 and 23, 1616, respectively.) Don Quixote is even credited with being the first novel in the modern sense, a turning point in the history of literature. It has inspired countless works of art, including paintings, sculptures, operas, plays, ballets, films, and of course, more novels. But the original is still worth experiencing. It is full of dry wit, bawdy humor, hilarious pranks, and cutting satire. It is speckled here and there with spots of literary criticism, swaths of swooning romance, stretches of action and suspense, twinkles of surrealistic fantasy, and now and then a spritz of touching pathos.

Partly because of the circumstances of its writing, which I was going to call “unique” until I realized how much it has in common with many other literary phenomena since then, this book also packs in the fascinating aspect of characters who are aware of being characters in a book. During the ten-year interval between its two volumes (published in 1605 and 1615), an unknown author under the pseudonym Avellaneda published a spurious sequel to the first part, which appropriated Cervantes’ characters and used them in a way so foreign to Cervantes’ intentions—not to mention insulting to the author himself—that the fraud actually altered the course Cervantes had planned for his hero. So when we read this novel today, we read a book whose second half is influenced by criticism of the first half, and by a response to a poorly executed work of fan-fiction that tried to cash in on it, and by a consciousness of being a book that runs so deep as to include a scene at the printing press. While Cervantes hides behind the conceit that he is translating the work of an Arabic historian, he takes digs at his literary rival and tries to explain his way out of continuity errors in the first volume. Don Quixote, meanwhile, both enjoys the notoriety and suffers the consequences of being the subject of a published book. He even, finally, meets a man who was a character in Avellaneda’s travesty, and forces him to admit that he isn’t the Don Quixote he knew.

Cervantes wrote in Spanish, and probably a dialect of Spanish that sounds old-fashioned today. Don Quixote spoke in an even older dialect that is now called Old Castilian. In translation this difference is probably hard to get across, except by having Don Quixote use lofty and archaic terms. Having a reader like David Case playing the characters can do a great deal to highlight distinctions like this. Case’s diction as Quixote has a flowery, exaggerated Britishness, with excessively rolled R s and a sense of having a stiff upper lip. As Sancho, he switches to a pastoral, West Country burr, full of dropped consonants and flattened vowels. Thus we of the English-speaking world make sense of the social distinctions of Cervantes’ Spain. But listen to the characters speak for themselves, for once. When you do, you may be surprised, and perhaps saddened to think how much time you lost in waiting for guilt to drive you into this book. Don’t wait for your “no one can be well-read without reading Don Quixote ” guilt to trip you into it against your will. You’ll really enjoy this book, especially if you accept the help of an Audiobook reader.

Full title: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha — Buy it! Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra at Wikipedia Recommended Ages: 13+

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Don Quixote Synopsis and Review

02 Dec Don Quixote Synopsis and Review

Thesis : “Don Quixote” is not only a story about the adventures of a delusional knight but also a profound exploration of reality, imagination, and the human condition.

Reading Age : 15+

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Plot Summary

“Don Quixote” is a rich narrative that spans across two parts, each with its own distinct flavor and set of adventures. In the first part, Alonso Quixano, an aging gentleman from La Mancha, becomes obsessed with the chivalric ideals touted in books he has read. Renaming himself Don Quixote, he decides to become a wandering knight, accompanied by his loyal squire, Sancho Panza. Don Quixote’s reality is blurred by fantasy, leading him to mistake inns for castles, windmills for giants, and commoners for noble characters.

The second part, published a decade later, shows a more self-aware Don Quixote, who has become a character not only in his own story but also in the world around him, as his fame from the first part’s publication precedes him. The tone here is more reflective and satirical, as Cervantes explores the interplay between fiction and reality.

This summary captures the essence of Don Quixote’s journey, highlighting the humor, pathos, and irony that Cervantes masterfully injects into the narrative.

Don Quixote Caricature

• Illusion vs. Reality : At its core, “Don Quixote” is an exploration of the boundary between reality and illusion. Don Quixote’s adventures blur this line, offering deep insights into the nature of perception and belief.
• The Idealism of Chivalry : The novel satirizes the then-popular chivalric romances, questioning the values and practicality of knightly ideals in the modern world.
• The Transformation of Characters : As the story progresses, both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza undergo significant character development, reflecting on their beliefs and experiences.

Character Descriptions

• Don Quixote : An aging gentleman who becomes a self-styled knight after losing his sanity. Idealistic and brave, yet often delusional.
• Sancho Panza : Don Quixote’s squire, a farmer with a pragmatic approach to life, often provides a contrast to his master’s idealism.
• Dulcinea del Toboso : A peasant woman whom Don Quixote idolizes as the perfect lady despite never having met her.
• Rich Characterization : The characters in “Don Quixote” are remarkably well-developed, each with distinct voices and arcs.
• Narrative Depth : The novel’s layered narrative offers both humor and profound philosophical insights.
• Timeless Satire : Cervantes’ critique of social norms and literary conventions remains relevant and impactful.

Illustration of Sancho Panza

• Pacing and Length : Modern readers may find the book’s length and pacing challenging.
• Language : The original Old Spanish language can be inaccessible to contemporary readers without a good translation.

Literary Devices

• Metafiction : Cervantes was ahead of his time in using metafictional techniques, blurring the lines between author, reader, and character.
• Irony : The novel extensively uses irony, especially in the contrast between Don Quixote’s idealism and the harsh realities of his world.

Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is a fundamental piece of world literature and a remarkable work of comedic satire. While it may be daunting for first-time readers due to its length, those who engage with it are rewarded with a rich exploration of complex themes and an enthralling narrative. It is highly recommended for readers interested in classic literature and those who appreciate a blend of comedy and profound thematic depth.​

Audience Suitability

Ideal for readers interested in classic literature, satire, and philosophical novels.

Comparisons

This novel can be compared to other classics that explore the nature of reality and idealism, like “Alice in Wonderland” or “Gulliver’s Travels.”

Recommendation

“Don Quixote” endures as a beloved masterpiece, enchanting readers for centuries with its blend of humor and depth. Its exploration of the human condition through the lens of a deluded yet endearing knight-errant and his faithful squire remains as relevant and compelling today as it was in the early 17th century. Scattered Books highly recommends Don Quixote!

Publisher: Ecco Press Publish Date: April 26, 2005 Pages: 992 Language: English ISBN: 9780060934347

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Unlike Shakespeare, Miguel De Cervantes isn’t the household name that many classical post-renaissance writers and play writers are. That said, Cervantes is responsible for one of the most influential and beloved books in the history of world literature. Don Quixote is a long-winded comedic tome, yet hits hard with some of the deepest themes about the nature of storytelling and illusion that you’ll ever read. It has inspired many people, including Terry Gilliam, the film writer of works such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail .

Content Guide

Spiritual Content : Most characters we meet are Catholic and Christianity is referenced constantly.

Violence: Characters duel, brawl and fight to the point of bruising. No brutal gore or severe violence.

Language/Crude Humor : Minimal harsh language.

Sexual Content: Minor references to love and sex, nothing graphic depicted.

Drug/Alcohol Use : Characters visit pubs at multiple points.

Other Negative Themes: None.

Positive Content: Positive depiction of religion.

On May 19th of this year, Terry Gilliam reached the end of a huge personal journey with the release of his long awaited film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote . The critically acclaimed director of films such as Brazil, 12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fisher King and Monty Python and the Holy Grail was finally able to release his passion project after a two decade battle with sick actors dropping out of lead roles, finances dropping out, insurance companies holding the rights to the film from him, and a lengthy last minute battle with his producer over ownership of the film that nearly delayed the premiere. This story is itemized in the brilliant documentary Lost in La Mancha, which details his attempt to shoot the film with John Hurt and Johnny Depp in the early 2000s. The story as a whole is one of profound willingness to go the distance for art in the name of passion. Gilliam really is attracted to the themes and ideas that the original novel put forth in it’s day. In his noble attempt to express his love, he put nearly a generation of time and patience into achieving his latest film. As it has yet to receive a full release, it’s hard to say what that will look like until it gets its wide release later this year. For now, I think the pertinent thing would be to go back and look into the original book to explore why such an influential director would go so far out of his way to make an adaptation of it. This was my mission, and as of February of this year, I was exploring the depths of one of Spanish literature’s most treasured books. I officially finished last week.

Don Quixote is a long book. Technically, it’s two intermediately long books with small typing, but as a whole it’s a nearly 900 page book. The audiobook version I used for a significant portion of the reading was itself 35 hours in length. Reading this book was an undertaking up there for me with reading T.H. White’s Once and Future or the Bible, which both took me significant periods of time as well. Yet, as the final moments of the book drifted past me, what overtook me was less a sense of accomplishment or relief, but melancholy. Don Quixote as a text is properly understood as a comedy, but its final moments measure to the profound status of tragedy as our heroes’ quest is weighted by the central character’s realization of the foolishness of his actions. 

One must look to the past to understand the bizarre story of Don Quixote .  Thankfully, my copy from the Barnes and Noble Classics Collection comes with an extensive prologue that details much of the history that makes the book contextually more interesting. Following the Renaissance, Medieval Europe went through a profound period of change and progress. The traditions of the past began to slowly erode in the face of gradual technical innovation, colonialism, and international trade. This left much of the old world with a great deal of anxiety. Change always elicits fear. as it presents the possibility that society is moving in the wrong direction. While we can look back at history now with a more powerful critical eye, let us not allow hindsight to inflate our pride. These people were legitimately nervous about their place in an ever-changing world. As a coping mechanism, many people turned to escapism in books, much as they do today. At the time, the preferred genre of choice were the famed Books of Chivalry. They were romantic and fantastical retellings of the stories of Medieval Knights transformed into mythic tales of slaying monsters and saving women. Author and playwright Miguel De Cerventes took issue with the popular form and sought to satirize the genre as he seemed to feel that the books themselves were escapist nonsense that was more harmful than good. With that, the beginning of his story of Don Quixote starts with a 16th century aristocrat who reads Books of Chivalry for so long and with so much passion that he goes mad. Full of vim and vigor, he dresses himself in a rusted suite of armor, mounts a withered old horse, and begins riding across then-modern Spain while att empting to right the wrongs of the world. If someone were to try and write a modern interpretation of this, it would essentially involve a man reading Louis L’Amour western novels until he decided to strap on a revolver and a cowboy hat before walking around a major metropolitan city and calling himself a gunslinger.

The duration of the book’s significant breadth concerns itself with documenting the various misadventures of the Knight Errant as he galavants across Spain. In the book’s most famous scene, Quixote and his trusty assistant, Sancho, come across a field of windmills which the mad Knight immediately misidentifies as giants. Quixote proceeds to storm the giants before a fan humorously knocks him off  his horse. This ends up being the central conceit of the novel and it’s comedic tone. Through his misadventures, Quixote constantly wraps himself in situations that involve him winding up in over his head. Considering the book’s length, we come to see a great deal of these misadventures and gradually watch them change and evolve with our other lead characters. By the second novel, our “hero” has become a renowned celebrity and that begins to factor into the adventures as people begin to interact with him differently. This all feeds back into the previously referenced tragic ending. It is a notably dower ending for such an otherwise gleeful chaotic romp, but it reflects the fascinating subtext of the book that has elevated the story into the realm of one of World Literature’s most revered texts.

There is seemingly a thematic clash between the book’s text and subtext. Cervantes makes it very clear that Don Quixote, as a character, is a fool who causes problems for himself and others. Beyond that text, however, there is a fascinating current running through the story that contradicts this. As Quixote grows into his role, he ends up developing a powerful ability to use his title to help people. Bumbling fool and all, by the end of the book the supporting characters, the story, and the reader genuinely love the lead. That is why the ending hits with such a melancholic feeling. This may seem like a contradiction but, intentional or not, it’s an honest depiction of why the Books of Chivalry were popular in the first place. People were inspired by the stories of Knights Errant storming across Europe slaying monsters and saving women. They weren’t true stories, but they were archetypical expressions of our deepest values as humans. It goes back to what Joseph Campbell described in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces . People are attracted to myths, legends, and religious stories because they teach us things about ourselves. These are stories we as a society need to survive. When we don’t get them from our church, we’ll make them ourselves and drown ourselves in fantasy stories until we go mad. Think about how in our modern world as our society grows farther from God and common decency, and how disagreements of seemingly minor problems like story issues in recent Star Wars movies can send people into violent rants.

The full tragedy of Don Quixote is the reveal of the place in life where honesty about the nature of life breaks down our illusions and we’re forced to admit the things that inspire us aren’t true in the literal sense. It’s a heart breaking realization that destroys our foolish hero. Yet, when he was at his height of absurdity, the confidence that the title of Don Quixote gave our hero inspired those around him. He reunited lovers, entertained the masses, and brought out the best in people around him. At his best, our lead was nothing short of an excellent orator and a wise philosopher, despite his madness. As such, Don Quixote is at once a totally honest comedy and a tragedy. Considering Terry Gilliam’s filmography over the course of his career has been all about the nexus of illusion, dreams, and reality, it’s no wonder that Don Quixote would inspire him so deeply. It’s no wonder he’d be patient enough to wait two decades to show his vision to other people. Don Quixote’s dream is all of our dreams. We are all inspired by grand legends to be better. We all dream of being more than we are. In that spirit, let us all do our best to slay our giants, yet know enough to know when they are actually windmills!

+ Fun, if Highly Contextual, Comedic Prose + Fascinating Themes About the Nature of Illusion and Storytelling + Melancholic and Emotional Ending

- Excessive Length May Be Difficult for First Time Readers

The Bottom Line

Miguel De Cervantes' critically acclaimed novel of the Knight Errant of La Mancha is one of the most important pieces of world literature and a wonderful piece of comedic satire. It might be difficult for first time readers, but people seeking complex themes and fun chaotic books would do themselves good to read through this!

Tyler Hummel

Gdpr & ccpa:, privacy overview.

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Why we read ‘don quixote’, arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

What does it mean to be “quixotic” today? Are street-corner preachers quixotic? Is Bono? What about film directors who dementedly pursue the unlikely grail of adapting a difficult book for the screen? The word endures because its source endures. Don Quixote de la Mancha is the first modern novel, and two weeks ago I found myself on the Upper East Side, at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, tracing the word part of the way toward its origin. In the inevitable absence of Miguel de Cervantes, it was left to the book’s most recent English translator, Edith Grossman, the publisher, Andrew Hoyem, and the artist, William T. Wiley to explain the book’s riverine significance. The Quixote Delta has proved fertile ground for world literature, branching off into numerous tributaries, irrigating any number of national traditions and, finally, trickling down into the work of some of the most singular figures in world literature, from Nabokov to Borges, Fielding to Garcia Marquez.

But doesn’t quixotic threaten to swamp Quixote ? Aren’t these words, which get coined in tribute to an author or a book, almost always treacherous? Can all the possibilities and implications of a character, or even—more ambitiously—a life’s work, be contained within the semantic boundaries of just one word? We think of Orwellian as adjectival shorthand for a state apparatus of terror and surveillance, but what if we also took it to mean window-pane clarity of expression or even a marked aversion to the poetry of Stephen Spender? In the same way, Don Quixote is not only a cautionary tale about the perils of idealism: among other things, it is also the first great book about books, a visionary parable about the responsibilities of reading and writing fiction that arrived early on in the age of printing. The river feeds into an ocean.

Illustration by William T. Wiley.

Fittingly then, the Spanish Institute has created an exhibit for the Arion Press edition of Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which was illustrated by Wiley. Punctuated by exclamations of warm applause, Hoyem, the founder and director of Arion Press, presented us with an account of the press’s establishment in 1974, its commitment to printing as a craft, and the surely unparalleled achievements of publishing illustrated editions of Moby-Dick , Ulysses , and even the Bible.

As Hoyem spoke, Grossman and Wiley sat enthroned on two sumptuously upholstered chairs, as though they might have been waiting for Velázquez to make their portraits. They would have formed an interestingly contrasting pair of character studies: while Grossman was very elegantly attired in a trouser suit and silk scarf, Wiley loomed darkly in a broad-brimmed hat and bolo. Having translated not just Cervantes, but numerous novels by Marquez, Vargas Llosa, and Ariel Dorfman (not to mention “a short erotic novella,” whose author went by sadly unnamed, in between books 1 and 2 of Don Quixote ), Grossman was well equipped to explain why Don Quixote was still being read. Afterward, at the reception, she told me that “you cannot write in Spanish without having Cervantes in mind … there is no question, in my mind, that you couldn’t have Marquez, for example, without him. They are all heirs of that style.” I shared with her my enthusiasm for one of the book’s early translators, the evergreen churl Tobias Smollett, author of Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker , and she agreed that “Cervantes’s influence blossomed in England … it comes by way of the eighteenth-century novelists like Fielding and Sterne.”

If Grossman made a case for the cultural permanence of Don Quixote , Wiley argued for the book’s contemporary relevance. I asked him what appealed to him about the book, and he spoke, with gentle conviction, about “the idealism and the chivalry we’ve been lacking. Don Quixote reminded me of early cowboy films like The Cisco Kid . There was the idealist, who almost always had a buffoonish sidekick, and they balanced each other in an interesting way. They never killed anyone; they just shot the gun out of their opponent’s hand.” Did he think that the book told us something about our own times? “If Quixote were here, he’d be busy—he’d be over in Madison, Wisconsin.” Later on, Wiley would create a polite ripple of shock among the audience by nominating Bradley Manning as a successor to the Quixotic spirit.

But as well as celebrating the daring moral venture of Don Quixote , this was an occasion for confirmed bibliophiles. Four hundred years after Cervantes’s masterpiece emerged, we now stand on the farthest shore of the printing age. We still buy books; we still want them hanging round, causing clutter or mess. Or at any rate, I do. For me, as for Anthony Powell, books furnish a room. I can’t imagine a bare, shelfless wall, not even in a kitchen, and I usually keep enough spare copies of the London Review of Books in my bathroom to practically paper over the tiles. Whenever I visit someone at home, my first trespass is always to inspect—closely—their personal library. Whoever proudly displays an Arion Press edition of Don Quixote in their abode will not just be the person most likely to be picking up the check after dinner, but someone incurably in love with the book as artifact and objet .

This passion is significant now because we have some idea of how a world without books might work. We at least know that we would continue to read. This blog alone suggests as much. As do the sleek, gray tablets you see every morning on the subway. But I intend no jeremiad against technology. If anything, I would rather have it both ways: the book and the blog; the lavish endeavor of the lovingly prepared new edition and the take-out convenience of the virtual text. Of course, having it both ways is very far from being quixotic. I’ll leave that to Wiley.

The exhibition featuring Arion Press’s edition of Don Quixote is on display at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute through April 20.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Experimental Novels › Analysis of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Analysis of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 31, 2019 • ( 0 )

Many critics maintain that the impulse that prompted Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616) to begin his great novel was a satiric one: He desired to satirize chivalric romances. As the elderly Alonso Quixano the Good (if that is his name) pores over the pages of these books in his study, his “brain dries up” and he imagines himself to be the champion who will take up the vanished cause of knighterrantry and wander the world righting wrongs, helping the helpless, defending the cause of justice, all for the greater glory of his lady Dulcinea del Toboso and his God.

As he leaves his village before dawn, clad in rusty armor and riding his broken-down nag, the mad knight becomes Don Quixote de la Mancha. His first foray is brief, and he is brought back home by friends from his native village. Despite the best efforts of his friends and relations, the mad old man embarks on a second journey, this time accompanied by a peasant from his village, Sancho Panza, who becomes the knight’s squire. The Don insists on finding adventure everywhere, mistaking windmills for giants, flocks of sheep for attacking armies, puppet shows for real life. His squire provides a voice of down-to-earth reason, but Quixote always insists that vile enchanters have transformed the combatants to embarrass and humiliate him. Don Quixote insists on his vision of the ideal in the face of the cold facts of the world; Sancho Panza maintains his proverbial peasant wisdom in the face of his master’s madness.

In their travels and adventures, they encounter life on the roads of Spain. Sometimes they are treated with respect— for example, by “the gentleman in green” who invites them to his home and listens to Quixote with genuine interest—but more often they are ridiculed, as when the Duke and Duchess bring the knight and squire to their estate only for the purpose of mocking them. Finally, a young scholar from Quixote’s native village, Sampson Carrasco, defeats the old knight in battle and forces him to return to his home, where he dies peacefully, having renounced his mad visions and lunatic behavior.

While it is necessary to acknowledge the satiric intent of Cervantes’ novel, the rich fictional world of Don Quixote de la Mancha utterly transcends its local occasion. On the most personal level, the novel can be viewed as one of the most intimate evaluations of a life ever penned by a great author. When Don Quixote decides to take up the cause of knight-errantry, he opens himself to a life of ridicule and defeat, a life that resembles Cervantes’ own life, with its endless reversals of fortune, humiliations, and hopeless struggles. Out of this life of failure and disappointment Cervantes created the “mad knight,” but he also added the curious human nobility and the refusal to succumb to despair in the face of defeat that turns Quixote into something more than a comic character or a ridiculous figure to be mocked. Although there are almost no points in the novel where actual incidents from Cervantes’ life appear directly or even transformed into fictional disguise, the tone and the spirit, the succession of catastrophes with only occasional moments of slight glory, and the resilience of human nature mark the novel as the most personal work of the author, the one where his singularly difficult life and his profoundly complex emotional responses to that life found form and structure.

If the novel is the record of Cervantes’ life, the fiction also records a moment in Spanish national history when fortunes were shifting and tides turning. At the time of Cervantes’ birth, Spain’s might and glory were at their peak. The wealth from conquests of Mexico and Peru returned to Spain, commerce boomed, and artists recorded the sense of national pride with magnificent energy and power. By the time Don Quixote de la Mancha was published, the Spanish Empire was beginning its decline. A series of military disasters, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English and the revolt of Flanders, had shaken the once mighty nation. In the figure of Don Quixote, the greatest of a richly remembered past combines with the hard facts of age, weakness, and declining power. The character embodies a moment of Spanish history and the Spanish people’s own sense of vanishing glory in the face of irreversible decline.

Don Quixote de la Mancha also stands as the greatest literary embodiment of the Counter-Reformation. Throughout Europe, the Reformation was moving with the speed of new ideas, changing the religious landscape of country after country. Spain stood proud as a Catholic nation, resisting any changes. Standing alone against the flood of reform sweeping Europe displayed a kind of willed madness, but the nobility and determination of Quixote to fight for his beliefs, no matter what the rest of the world maintained, reflects the strength of the Spanish will at this time. Cervantes was a devout and loyal believer, a supporter of the Church, and Don Quixote may be the greatest fictional Catholic hero, the battered knight of the Counter-Reformation.

The book also represents fictionally the various sides of the Spanish spirit and the Spanish temper. In the divisions and contradictions found between the Knight of the Sad Countenance and his unlikely squire, Sancho Panza, Cervantes paints the two faces of the Spanish soul: The Don is idealistic, sprightly, energetic, and cheerful, even in the face of overwhelming odds, but he is also overbearing, domineering Sancho, who is earthy, servile, and slothful. The two characters seem unlikely companions and yet they form a whole, the one somehow incomplete without the other and linked throughout the book through their dialogues and debates. In drawing master and servant, Cervantes presents the opposing truths of the spirit of his native land.

Characterization

The book can also be seen as a great moment in the development of fiction, the moment when the fictional character was freed into the real world of choice and change. When the gentleman of La Mancha took it into his head to become a knight-errant and travel through the world redressing wrongs and winning eternal glory, the face of fiction permanently changed. Character in fiction became dynamic, unpredictable, and spontaneous. Until that time, character in fiction had existed in service of the story, but now the reality of change and psychological energy and freedom of the will became a permanent hallmark of fiction, as it already was of drama and narrative poetry. The title character’s addled wits made the new freedom all the more impressive. The determination of Don Quixote, the impact of his vision on the world, and the world’s hard reality as it impinges on the Don make for shifting balances and constant alterations in fortune that are psychologically believable. The shifting balance of friendship, devotion, and perception between the knight and his squire underlines this freedom, as does the power of other characters in the book to affect Don Quixote’s fortunes directly: the niece, the housekeeper, the priest, the barber, Sampson Carrasco, the Duke, and the Duchess. There is a fabric of interaction throughout the novel, and characters in the novel change as they encounter new adventures, new people, and new ideas.

One way Cervantes chronicles this interaction is in dialogue. Dialogue had not played a significant or defining role in fiction before Don Quixote de la Mancha . As knight and squire ride across the countryside and engage in conversation, dialogue becomes the expression of character, idea, and reality. In the famous episode with windmills early in the first part of the novel (when Quixote views the windmills on the plain and announces that they are giants that he will wipe from the face of the earth, and Sancho innocently replies, “What giants?”), the dialogue not only carries the comedy but also becomes the battleground on which the contrasting visions of life engage one another—to the delight of the reader. The long exchanges between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza provide priceless humor but also convey two different realities that meet, struggle, and explode in volleys of words. In giving his characters authentic voices that carry ideas, Cervantes brought to fiction a new truth that remains a standard of comparison.

The Narrator

Don Quixote de la Mancha is also as modern as the most experimental of later fiction. Throughout the long novel, Cervantes plays with the nature of the narrator, raising constant difficult questions as to who is telling the story and to what purpose. In the riotously funny opening page of the novel, the reader encounters a narrator not only unreliable but also lacking in the basic facts necessary to tell the story. He chooses not to tell the name of the village where his hero lives, and he is not even sure of his hero’s name, yet the narrator protests that the narrative must be entirely truthful.

In chapter 9, as Don Quixote is preparing to do battle with the Basque, the narrative stops; the narrator states that the manuscript from which he is culling this story is mutilated and incomplete. Fortunately, some time later in Toledo, he says, he came upon an old Arabic manuscript by Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli that continues the adventures. For the remainder of the novel, the narrator claims to be providing a translation of this manuscript—the manuscript and the second narrator, the Arab historian, both lacking authority and credibility. In the second part of the novel, the narrator and the characters themselves are aware of the first part of the novel as well as of a “false Quixote,” a spurious second part written by an untalented Spanish writer named Avallaneda who sought to capitalize on the popularity of the first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha by publishing his own sequel. The “false Quixote” is on the narrator’s mind, the characters’ minds, and somehow on the mind of Cide Hamete Benengeli. These shifting perspectives, the multiple narrative voices, the questionable reliability of the narrators, and the “false” second part are all tricks, narrative sleight of hand as complex as anything found in the works of Faulkner , Vladimir Nabokov , or Jorge Luis Borges . In his Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), Nabokov oddly makes no reference to Cervantes’ narrative games; perhaps the old Spanish master’s shadow still loomed too close to the modern novelist.

None of these approaches to the novel, however, appropriate as they may be, can begin to explain fully the work’s enduring popularity or the strange manner in which the knight and his squire have ridden out of the pages of a book into the other artistic realms of orchestral music, opera, ballet, and painting, where other artists have presented their visions of Quixote and Sancho.Acurrent deeper and more abiding than biography, history, national temper, or literary landmark flows through the book and makes it speak to all manner of readers in all ages.

Early in the novel, Cervantes begins to dilute his strong satiric intent. The reader can laugh with delight at the inanity of the mad knight but never with the wicked, unalloyed glee that pure satire evokes. The knight begins to loom over the landscape; his madness brushes sense; his ideals demand defense. The reader finds him- or herself early in the novel taking an attitude equivalent to that of the two young women of easy virtue who see Quixote when he arrives at an inn, which he believes to be a castle, on his first foray. Quixote calls them “two beauteous maidens . . . taking air at the gate of the castle,” and they fall into helpless laughter, confronted with such a mad vision of themselves as “maidens.” In time, however, because of Quixote’s insistence on the truth of his vision, they help him out of his armor and set a table for him. They treat him as a knight, not as a mad old fool; he treats them as ladies, and they behave as ladies. The laughter stops, and, for a pure moment, life transforms itself and human beings transcend themselves.

Contradictions

This mingling of real chivalry and transcendent ideals with the absurdity of character and mad action creates the tensions in the book as well as its strange melancholy beauty and haunting poignancy. The book is unlike any other ever written. John Berryman has commented on this split between the upheld ideal and the riotously real, observing that the reader “does not know whether to laugh or cry, and does both.” This old man with his dried-up brain, with his squire who has no “salt in his brain pan,” with his rusty armor, his pathetic steed, and his lunatic vision that changes windmills into giants and flocks of sheep into attacking armies, this crazy old fool becomes a real knight-errant. The true irony of the book and its history is that Don Quixote actually becomes a model for knighthood. He may be a foolish, improbable knight, but with his squire, horse, and armor he has ridden into the popular imagination of the world not only as a ridiculous figure but also as a champion; he is a real knight whose vision may often cloud, who sees what he wants to see, but he is also one who demonstrates real virtue and courage and rises in his rhetoric and daring action to real heights of greatness.

Perhaps Cervantes left a clue as to the odd shift in his intention. The contradictory titles he assigns to his knight suggest this knowledge. The comic, melancholy strain pervades “Knight of the Sad Countenance” in the first part of the novel, and the heroic strain is seen in the second part when the hero acquires the new sobriquet “Knight of the Lions.” The first title comes immediately after his adventure with a corpse and is awarded him by his realistic companion, Sancho. Quixote has attacked a funeral procession, seeking to avenge the dead man. Death, however, cannot be overcome; the attempted attack merely disrupts the funeral, and the valiant knight breaks the leg of an attending churchman. The name “Knight of the Sad Countenance” fits Quixote’s stance here and through much of the book. Many of the adventures he undertakes are not only misguided but also unwinnable. Quixote may be Christlike, but he is not Christ, and he cannot conquer Death.

The adventure with the lions earns for him his second title and offers the other side of his journey as a knight. Encountering a cage of lions being taken to the king, Quixote becomes determined to fight them. Against all protest, he takes his stand, and the cage is opened. One of the lions stretches, yawns, looks at Quixote, and lies down. Quixote proclaims a great victory and awards himself the name “Knight of the Lions.” A delightfully comic episode, the scene can be viewed in two ways—as a nonadventure that the knight claims as a victory or as a genuine moment of triumph as the knight undertakes an outlandish adventure and proves his genuine bravery while the king of beasts realizes the futility of challenging the unswerving old knight. Quixote, by whichever route, emerges as conqueror. Throughout his journeys, he often does emerge victorious, despite his age, despite his illusions, despite his dried-up brain.

When, at the book’s close, he is finally defeated and humiliated by Sampson Carrasco and forced to return to his village, the life goes out of him. The knight Don Quixote is replaced, however, on the deathbed by Alonso Quixano the Good. Don Quixote does not die, for the elderly gentleman regains his wits and becomes a new character. Don Quixote cannot die, for he is the creation of pure imagination. Despite the moving and sober conclusion, the reader cannot help but sense that the death scene being played out does not signify the end of Don Quixote. The knight escapes and remains free. He rides out of the novel, with his loyal companion Sancho at his side, into the golden realm of myth. He becomes the model knight he hoped to be. He stands tall with his spirit, his ideals, his rusty armor, and his broken lance as the embodiment of man’s best intentions and impossible folly. As Dostoevski so wisely said, when the Lord calls the Last Judgment, man should take with him this book and point to it, for it reveals all of man’s deep and fatal mystery, his glory and his sorrow.

Major works Plays: El trato de Argel, pr. 1585 (The Commerce of Algiers, 1870); Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, 1615 (includes Pedro de Urdemalas [Pedro the Artful Dodger, 1807], El juez de los divorcios [The Divorce Court Judge, 1919], Los habladores [Two Chatterboxes, 1930], La cueva de Salamanca [The Cave of Salamanca, 1933], La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo [Choosing a Councilman in Daganzo, 1948], La guarda cuidadosa [The Hawk-Eyed Sentinel, 1948], El retablo de las maravillas [The Wonder Show, 1948], El rufián viudo llamada Trampagos [Trampagos the Pimp Who Lost His Moll, 1948], El viejo celoso [The Jealous Old Husband, 1948], and El vizcaíno fingido [The Basque Imposter, 1948]); El cerco de Numancia, pb. 1784 (wr. 1585; Numantia: A Tragedy, 1870; also known as The Siege of Numantia); The Interludes of Cervantes, 1948. poetry: Viaje del Parnaso, 1614 (The Voyage to Parnassus, 1870).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Cervantes. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. _______. Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Cascardi, Anthony J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Castillo, David R. (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001. Close, A. J. Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Durán, Manuel. Cervantes. New York: Twayne, 1974. Hart, Thomas R. Cervantes’ Exemplary Fictions: A Study of the “Novelas ejemplares.” Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. McCrory, Donald P. No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes. Chester Springs, Pa.: Peter Owen, 2002. Mancing, Howard. Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on “Don Quixote.” Edited by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Riley, E. C. Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel. 1962. Reprint. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1992. Weiger, John G. The Substance of Cervantes. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Williamson, Edwin, ed. Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of Influence. London: Tamesis, 1994. Source :  Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010

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Book Review

Don quixote.

• Miguel de Cervantes; translator Edith Grossman
• Adventure , Historical , Medieval

Readability Age Range

• Part One 1605, part two 1615; Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2003

Year Published

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

In 16th-century Spain, a 50-year-old country gentleman with a comparatively low income is obsessed with books about knights and chivalry. He decides to become a knight-errant, wandering around the countryside righting wrongs and seeking adventures. He promptly re-names everything associated with himself to make it sound grander. His old worn-out horse becomes Rocinante; the peasant girl he has a crush on becomes Dulcinea of Toboso; and he chooses to call himself Don Quixote.

Quixote leaves his home and allows his horse to choose the road, eventually coming to rest at an inn. He views the inn as a magnificent castle and asks the innkeeper to formally knight him. After Quixote attacks two guests for carelessly tossing around his armor, the innkeeper conducts a quick knighting ceremony to satisfy Quixote and get him to leave the inn.

Next, he encounters a farmer flogging a servant boy, and he orders the man to stop. When the boy says the farmer hasn’t paid him in months, Quixote orders the farmer to pay the wages he has withheld. Then Quixote leaves, assuming the farmer will follow his commands, although the farmer resumes beating the boy.

He encounters a group of merchants and tries to force them to swear that Dulcinea is the prettiest woman in the world. They don’t respond positively, and he is about to attack them when his horse trips and he falls to the ground. One of the merchants’ mule drivers beats him. Quixote is so badly beaten that he cannot walk. A neighboring farmer carries him home. Quixote’s friends, niece and housekeeper are anxiously waiting for his return. His friends burn all his books about chivalry, but to no avail. He wakes up and seeks out adventures again.

Quixote asks a poor farmer named Sancho Panza to become his squire. The two of them set out on the road and almost immediately encounter a large group of windmills. Quixote says the windmills are giants and decides to attack them. One windmill knocks him down and breaks his lance, causing him to believe an enchanter turned the giants into windmills.

Quixote sees two friars on the road, riding ahead of a lady’s carriage. He attacks, mistaking them for evil enchanters capturing a princess. The friars escape, but half of Quixote’s ear is cut off in a battle with the lady’s servant.

After a fight with some pony drivers, Quixote and Sancho are badly beaten with rods and manage to safely reach an inn. Due to several cases of mistaken identity, Quixote is beaten up by the innkeeper’s servant girl’s lover, as is Sancho, and they ride away from the inn in worse shape than they arrived. Quixote says the inn is under an evil enchantment.

Quixote frees slaves who are being sent to the Spanish galley for their crimes, but he also gets into a fight with them after he frees them. They throw stones at Quixote and Sancho and steal their meager belongings. They then meet a nearly insane young man named Cardenio, who was betrayed by his friend Don Fernando. Fernando married Cardenio’s beloved Lucinda against her will.

Quixote’s best friends in La Mancha, a priest and a barber, resolve to bring him back home to La Mancha so he can recover from his madness. They happen to meet a wronged maiden named Dorotea, who has been wooed and then abandoned by Don Fernando. They convince Dorotea to say that she is a princess and to beg Quixote to come back with her to defeat the giant who has invaded her kingdom. Dorotea, the priest, the barber, Sancho, Quixote and Cardenio all end up at the previous inn, the place that is supposedly under an evil enchantment. Don Fernando and Lucinda also arrive at the inn, and after several tear-filled speeches, the two main couples are sorted correctly: Cardenio ends up with Lucinda, and Don Fernando is again with Dorotea.

Some officers of the Holy Brotherhood, the police force of the area, come to the inn with a warrant for Quixote’s arrest, because he freed the galley slaves who were supposed to serve in the Spanish fleet. The priest talks them out of arresting Quixote, then the priest and barber proceed to tie up Quixote and put him into a cage on the back of an ox cart so they can carry him home to his niece and housekeeper. The women are distressed at Quixote’s unhealthy and dazed appearance, and they fear that he will set out upon more adventures. This concludes the first part of Don Quixote.

The second part of Don Quixote was published 10 years after the first one, and the author mentions an unauthorized sequel that a different author published in the interim. He opens part two with a scathing letter condemning the other author for stealing his characters.

The priest and barber go to see Quixote one month after his previous journeys have concluded. Sancho also visits and gets into an argument with Quixote’s housekeeper, who thinks it is Sancho who led Quixote on their knightly misadventures, instead of the other way around.

Sancho tells Quixote that a book has been written about their previous adventures, so the two of them are now well known. From this point forward, most of the people that Sancho and Quixote meet have read Don Quixote part one, or have read the false sequel by another author, so Quixote and Sancho become characters twice over — characters in the novel itself and characters in their own reality. People treat the duo differently based on what they have read about them.

Sancho brings a young scholar named Sanson Carrasco to meet Quixote. Sanson has read Don Quixote part one and describes it further to them. Sanson is fond of tricks and mischief, and when he talks with the priest and barber about helping Quixote prepare to leave home on a second adventure, it becomes clear that all three men are so amused by Quixote’s antics, they don’t really want him to recover from his madness.

As they start their second journey, Quixote and Sancho meet a cart full of actors dressed in costumes to look like heroes, gods and demons. One actor’s intentionally wild antics scare Rocinante and make Sancho’s donkey run away. Sancho talks Quixote out of attacking the actors, since the actors are armed with stones and would overpower the duo.

Quixote and Sancho run across another knight errant in the woods, and they overhear him singing a sad song about his lady love. Quixote decides to have further conversation with the knight, and they eventually decide to duel each other. The other knight wears shiny armor, so he is referred to as the Knight of Mirrors. Quixote knocks the Knight of Mirrors to the ground. When the knight’s visor is removed, he discovers it is Sanson Carrasco, from their hometown. Quixote sends Sanson away, battered but alive.

The duo encounters a wagon carrying two lions that are intended to be a present for the King of Spain. Quixote demands that the driver stop and unlock the cages so that he can battle the lions. The first lion decides not to come out of its cage, and for once Quixote follows Sancho’s advice and doesn’t provoke the lion to fight him. The lion incident ends without a battle, and Quixote even pays the driver money for frightening and inconveniencing him.

They travel to the famous Cave of Montesinos, and Quixote asks Sancho and the guide to lower him into the cave by ropes. When they pull him up, he seems to be asleep. When he wakes up, he tells them a fantastic story. He says in the cave he met the legendary Montesinos, a character famous in old Spanish ballads, and entered a crystal palace. He saw the body of Durandarte, an equally legendary knight, and was told that Merlin the enchanter was keeping Montesinos and Durandarte under a spell that only Quixote could release. His story is so convincing that Sancho almost believes it.

They meet a beautiful duchess in the woods, and she and her husband, a duke, invite Quixote and Sancho to their castle. The duke and duchess have read the first book of Don Quixote, so they like him but are inclined to amuse themselves by tricking him and making fun of his madness. For example, they know that Quixote is under the belief that his beloved Dulcinea of Toboso (who never appears in the novel) is under an enchantment, which has turned her into a peasant girl. The duke and duchess arrange for someone to dress up as the enchanter Merlin and tell Quixote that Dulcinea’s enchantment can be reversed if Sancho strikes his own backside with a whip 3,300 times. Sancho finds this unreasonable and refuses to help disenchant Dulcinea in this fashion.

The next falsehood the duke and duchess concoct is the plight of Countess Trifaldi. One of their servants dresses as a distinguished countess and tells Quixote that a princess and a knight she once served have been turned into figurines by an evil giant. She tells Quixote that he has to ride on a flying wooden horse to a faraway land to fight the giant.

Quixote and Sancho are blindfolded and put on a wooden horse with servants blowing air from a bellows to make them feel as if they’re flying through the air to a distant location. The horse explodes from the fireworks inside it, throwing both men to the ground. When they come to their senses, they find a note saying that they have undone the enchantment just by attempting to undo it.

The duke and duchess make Sancho the governor of a small town, which they tell him is an island, since he has always wanted to govern an island. Quixote gives him some excellent advice about how to rule wisely. Even though the whole thing is intended as a practical joke, Sancho actually rules well, judges cases fairly and creates good laws. The governorship comes to an end when Sancho’s people stage an enemy attack at the behest of the duke and duchess. Since Sancho doesn’t feel brave enough to defend his people from enemies that he does not realize are imaginary, he decides to forfeit his governorship.

Quixote and Sancho are reunited and finally leave the duke and duchess’s castle. After several more adventures, Quixote meets someone called the Knight of the White Moon, who challenges him to combat. The Knight of the White Moon says that if he wins the challenge, he wants Quixote to go home and give up knight errantry for a year. Quixote is knocked off of his horse and accepts the one-year banishment to his hometown. One of Quixote’s friends follows the knight and discovers that it was again Sanson Carrasco, dressing as a knight, trying to get Quixote to give up his madness and go home.

Quixote reacts badly to his loss of the duel. He’s not severely injured by the fall, but he stays sick in bed for six days from the emotional upset of defeat. The duo journeys slowly toward La Mancha. Quixote and Sancho are captured by armed men who force them to march back to the duke and duchess’s castle yet again.

At the castle, they are holding a funeral for the servant girl Altisidora, who supposedly died from her unrequited love for Quixote. A man dressed as a judge says that she will come to life again if Sancho is slapped 24 times across the face. Sancho reluctantly accepts the assault, and Altisidora revives.

At last the duo returns to La Mancha, with Quixote plagued by doubts that he’ll ever see Dulcinea again. When he reaches his home, his housekeeper and niece are thrilled, and he tells the priest and Sanson that he intends to be a shepherd for a year. He has picked special shepherd names for himself and his friends, suggesting they all become shepherds together. But he never manages to fulfill his new shepherding dream. In his weakened physical and emotional state, he succumbs to a fever and dies, surrounded by loving friends. Before his death, he renounces chivalry and knight errantry as foolish, and asks to be called by his real name, Alonso Quixano.

Christian Beliefs

Quixote often makes reference to God, saying that he fights for God’s justice.

One of Quixote’s friends is a priest. Quixote’s housekeeper wants him to sprinkle their household library with holy water so that no harm comes to the family for burning books, but the priest does not comply and finds her request simpleminded.

Sancho often says that God is in control and will decide the outcome of all Quixote’s adventures. Quixote says that knights are ministers of God on earth, working His will and bringing about His justice.

On his deathbed, Quixote praises God for His mercies toward humankind.

Other Belief Systems

Quixote prays out loud to Dulcinea to preserve him in battle. His ideals of courtly love lead him to view Dulcinea as a kind of patron saint or goddess whose support gives him emotional strength.

Quixote’s niece says an enemy enchanter came and burned his books. Quixote attributes nearly all of his misfortunes to enchanters and evil spells.

When Quixote fears bad omens, Sancho says that Christians have no reason to pay attention to omens.

Altisidora says that when she died, she went to the gates of hell and saw demons playing games, tossing books instead of balls.

Authority Roles

Quixote is a self-proclaimed knight interested in protecting others, but he usually attacks people who offend him. He makes unreasonable demands of others, refuses to pay for food or lodging and destroys others’ property whenever it suits his fancy. In the second part of the novel, he mends his behavior by honestly paying for lodging and backing down from unreasonable fights. He also gives wise and thoughtful advice in part two, which shows some positive growth.

After being promised riches, Sancho Panza leaves his wife and children to become Quixote’s squire. He still maintains contact with home by writing letters, and he hopes for the future welfare of his children. He briefly becomes the wise governor of a town.

An officer of the Holy Brotherhood, which is something like a police force, attempts to help the wounded Quixote. However, when Quixote annoys him, he also strikes Quixote forcefully and abandons him without helping. Other officers of the Holy Brotherhood seem more threatening than helpful.

The duke and duchess abuse their power to have fun at Quixote’s expense.

Profanity & Violence

The word d–n appears almost a dozen times, and whore/whoreson appears around two dozen times. The story is littered with numerous instances of interpersonal violence. A few examples:

Quixote hits two muledrivers over the head with the blunt end of his lance. The blows are so hard that one man’s skull is fractured.

Another muledriver attacks Quixote with his own lance and beats him until he can’t stand or walk. Quixote’s ear is half cut off in a fight with a servant.

Quixote’s mouth is bloodied and his ribs nearly broken in a fight with a muledriver.

Sexual Content

Quixote meets two prostitutes at an inn, but he does not understand their profession and mistakes them for princesses.

Quixote tells a story about ancient times where maidens roamed the earth freely without worrying about being assaulted. He says that later on, wicked man kept attacking maidens; knights began to travel around to protect the women.

Maritornes, an innkeeper’s servant girl, makes an agreement to sleep with a muledriver but walks to Quixote’s bed by mistake. Quixote believes she is a princess who has come to sleep with him and he tells her that he wishes he could, but his vow to love Dulcinea prevents him.

Don Fernando convinced Dorotea to sleep with him under the promise that he would marry her afterward. He instead abandoned her, but later he eventually marries her. Sancho believed Dorotea was a princess, but after catching her kissing Don Fernando at the inn, he is certain that a true princess wouldn’t kiss men so readily.

Quixote’s friend the priest reads aloud to guests at an inn from a novel about infidelity. The story is about a man who wants to test his wife’s purity by having his best friend attempt to seduce her. Ultimately, the best friend and the wife do carry on an adulterous affair without the husband’s knowledge.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion questions for this book and others, at FocusOnTheFamily.com/discuss-books .

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LMBC Big Books Edition: Don Quixote

It’s almost summer, and that means it’s time for the Low Maintenance Book Club Big Books Edition! This year, we’ll be reading  Don Quixote , sometimes described as a founding novel of Western Literature and/or the greatest work ever written. Do you agree? Let’s discuss!

Since this work is especially epic, we’ll cover it over four meetings. The first is scheduled for  Wednesday, May 22 nd  at noon over Zoom  and covers Part I & II. Although you’re welcome to read any translation, we recommend works by  Grossman ,  Raffel  or  Jarvis .

Although the readings are longer, the low maintenance attitude is the same. Join as you like, discuss as much as you want–or just hang out and enjoy the company. Everyone is welcome.   Just RSVP so we know how many to expect , and we’ll send out a Zoom link the morning of the meeting.

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy ([email protected]).

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