Don Quixote
by Miguel De Cervantes
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Book Summary Information
Author: Miguel De CervantesTranslator: Edith Grossman
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-26
ISBN: 0060934344
Number of pages: 992
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780060934347
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Don Quixote
Book Review: Enchanting Errancy
Summary: 5 Stars
Enchanting Errancy
Don Quixote is the greatest novel ever, marking a decisive point in the emergence of the modern mind and setting the foundation for methods of satire, drama, comedy and cultural analysis. Old-fashioned style can make great classics less accessible. Edith Grossman's superb translation of Don Quixote completely overcomes this problem, with a reading as modern and engaging as anything written today.
The Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote, sets his own rational but groundless imagination against the power of observation by the senses, achieving a hallucinatory faith that his waking dreams are real. His power to convince himself that flocks of sheep are armies and windmills are giants mocks all imaginative stories that conflict with evidence. Cervantes is decisively modern in his assertion that evidence is a stronger guide than authority, a suggestion strongly at odds with church dogma. Don Quixote is an absurd literary character. With this magnificent creation, Cervantes is a pioneer in the modern disjunction between observation and cognition. Absurdity emerges in his fictional satire of traditional values.
Cervantes created Quixote with close attention to the opportunity afforded for a study of the psychology of madness. The source of Quixote's insanity is said to be his love of chivalry, and chivalric literature, and his resulting desire to live the noble life of a knight errant. The picture painted is of a madman fantasizing about armed service to defend the needy in a land at peace. The military knight in arms was a throwback to the medieval time and the Dark Ages of the Gothic conquest of Spain. However, what is the subtext?
Spain had conquered South America in consort with Portugal a century before Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, through force of arms and disease. So, the picture of a man at arms in Spain was not as anachronistic as Cervantes paints, but merely displaced across the Atlantic Ocean. The adventures of Quixote and his trusty servant Sancho Panza bear comparison with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas. The tradition of chivalry seemed irrelevant from the civil society perspective of mercantile Spain, but at that very time, military leaders steeped in a chivalric tradition, but willing to employ any means for conquest and plunder, were expanding the Spanish Empire on behalf of the Crown and people of Spain. Military conquest on such large scale requires a touch of Quixotic madness.
Many stories from chivalry inform Don Quixote. One is The Madness of Sir Lancelot. A motif borrowed by Cervantes from this tale is the knight wearing only a ragged shirt who is lost by himself in the wilderness for love of a beautiful woman. Don Quixote copies this and other actions of Lancelot, going above and beyond the legacy of the father of the grail knight by performing several cartwheels while in his state of melancholy undress, as part of his quest to typify knighthood.
Don Quixote has my sympathy. Sent mad by reading too many fictitious old books, he stands as the embodiment of chivalrous virtue (except for his murderous actions) in an age of squalor. The absurdity inherent in maintaining chivalrous values in a world of modern machines is captured by the famous story of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill, breaking his lance and being tossed from his horse by the turning blade. Using absurdity to mock chivalry is a method that inspired an illustrious modern tradition of satire. The British comedians Monty Python borrow from Cervantes in important respects in the movie The Quest for the Holy Grail. Python King Arthur's lines are modeled on Quixote's formal mode of address, and the Black Knight copies Quixote in seeking to prevent the passage of innocent travelers by threatening death by sword and collapsing into madness and absurdity in his "none shall pass" caper.
Cervantes points out that his writing method, claiming to improve an Arabic text of unknown provenance, shares much with the chronicles of chivalry. We might note his method shares much with older texts as well, such as the Bible, that are also reputed to be history, and that have as much claim to be fact as the celebrated Man of La Mancha. It is always helpful to claim that a book (like the Bible) is 'based on a true story', and this method is at the core of Cervantes' satirical style. Cervantes takes the opportunity of his entertaining buffoonery to satirise the entire courtly world of Holy Spain, safe in the modern confidence that his deft style can deflect any claims of impiety and other unwelcome attention from censors and critics.
At one point, a priest and a servant conspire to burn all Don Quixote's books. The book burning drips with irony. The reader is invited to think, if reading books is this bad, why did Cervantes write such a fat book, so full of literary allusions, and why the hell am I reading it? I'm sure there is a strong political message in this episode, as book burning was associated with the auto-da-fe, the 'act of faith' where the Inquisition burnt heretics at the stake. Cervantes is condemning book burning as the act of idiots, with the vacillation of the priest showing his recognition that his complicity was an immoral piece of cultural vandalism. The overt message of the book-burning is that Don Quixote has sent himself mad by reading rubbishy fiction books and believing they are factual, therefore any sensible person will avoid reading entirely and will stick to practical activity. However, Cervantes himself is obviously steeped in this chivalric tradition that he affects to despise, and seems to think people can learn something from tales of knight errantry, perhaps rather like the popular pulp romances of today which may give psychological insights for all their formulaic wish-fulfillment. So the irony is that the surface language of the book-burning episode presents the consignment to the flames as a necessary and ethical task, while just below the surface is the disturbing sense that here we see wanton vandalism and loss of values that the destroyers (except the priest) are unable to comprehend.
The deeper irony is the critique of Christian theology. Christians have been among the greatest book-burners in history, largely responsible for the amnesia of the dark ages which set the scene for knight errantry, such as the legendary burning of the great classical library of Alexandria in Egypt. Cervantes is reconstructing a continuity with classical civilization. Stories from Homer and Ovid were common coin among the literary elite of his day but are now forgotten by our contemporary equivalents of book burners. Christians, by believing in miracles, are just like Don Quixote, and deserve the same level of incredulity about their insanity as his amazed onlookers give to the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. But the Bible was off limits for mockery. Don Quixote himself later says he would like to burn at the stake anyone who suggests that chivalric literature is not 100% factual. So the surface message is that Christian civilization can mock the fantasy world of chivalry, but the unstated irony is that Christianity is just as fantastic as the delusions it mocks.
Summary of Don Quixote
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.Classics Books
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