Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Don Quixote
Book Review: Don Quixote
Summary: 5 Stars
The book was delivered in a timely manner and was in excellent shape.
R.L.Rex
Book Review: Don Quixote
Summary: 4 Stars
This was purchased for my son's high english class. He preferred this edition to the abridged one I had initially purchased at a local bookstore. I have always been able to rely on Amazon to find what I need.Book Review: Don Quixote is my Spanish Bible.
Summary: 5 Stars
"Time ripens all things. No man is born wise."
Don Quixote is one of my ten favorite novels, and I confess I read it as my Spanish Bible. Miguel de Cervantes's novel follows a disconnected series adventures of the self-proclaimed "Don Quixote de la Mancha," a fifty-year-old country gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who has an obsession for reading books. Eventually, because he has lost so much sleep reading books, he deludes himself into believing he is a knight errant. He puts on an old suit of armor, mounts his skinny horse Rocinante, and then sets out with his dull-witted neighbour, Sancho Panza, "for there were evils to undo, wrongs to right, injustices to correct, abuses to ameliorate, and offenses to rectify" (p. 24). Don Quixote's muse and courtly love interest is Dulcinea del Toboso (a neighbouring peasant girl, Aldonza Lorenzo), who is totally oblivious of Quixote's feelings for her. She never actually appears in the novel. Soon we find Quixote attacking windmills, believing they are giants. On his Quixotic quest, he repeatedly becomes the butt of outrageously cruel practical jokes, all because of his self-deception. Even his humble squire Sancho is forced to play along with Quixote's delusions. Although Quixote's quest for adventure leads him to complete disillusionment, melancholia, and to the renunciation of chivalry, ultimately (as Harold Bloom suggests in his excellent Introduction) Cervantes' novel may be read as a lesson in Quixotism (note the capital Q), the act of being caught up in idealism or in the romance of noble deeds, and the pursuit of unreachable goals (fighting with the Windmills of one's own Head).
Dostoyevsky called Don Quixote "the ultimate and most sublime work of human thinking." There are many translations of Don Quixote (at least twenty in English), the two most recent by John Rutherford and by Edith Grossman. While I am not qualified to say Grossman's is the definitive edition of Don Quixote, there are several reasons to read her translation. First, she is an award-winning translator respected for her previous translations of Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude;Love in the Time of Cholera). "Fidelity is surely our highest aim," she has said about the art of translation; "but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation." Her translation of Don Quixote has been praised by such writers and as Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom, and is quite readable. Second, Grossman's translation includes an insightful introduction by Bloom, making this a highly-recommended edition, if not a definitive edition of Don Quixote.
G. Merritt
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.
Book Review: Footnotes!
Summary: 4 Stars
What you'll like about this edition is the explanatory footnotes on the bottom of the page--so you don't have to flip back and forth to consult brief notes that do help give hints and context for many of Cervantes' references. Like Dante, Cervantes made lots of these references (usually ironic or satiric)--to authors, works, customs, and so forth--and while you can enjoy the book without knowing precisely what they mean, it's a lot more enjoyable to have them. Grossman's translation is certainly a competent one--but the fact is that no one has been totally successful in translation Cervantes into modern English idiom; his 16th century prose is very ornate, with odd positioning of subject, verb, and object, and tends to be slow going for modern readers.