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Summary
Summary
Complete and unabridged, in the memorable Walter Starkie translation, this is the epic tale of Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza. Their picaresque adventures in the world of sixteenth-century Spain form the basis of one of the great treasures of Western literature - a book that is both an immortal satire on an outdated chivalric code and a biting portrayal of an age in which nobility can be a form of madness. Imbued with superb comedy and irony, Don Quixote stands as a testament to the author's rich artistry. It is, as Walter Starkie writes, "the first modern novel in the world, created out of a life of disillusion, privation, and poverty by a maimed ex-soldier...whose noble nature and gentle sense of humourous tolerance taught him that life is an unending dialogue between a knight of the spirit who is ever striving to soar aloft, and a squire who clings to his master and strives with might and main to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground."
Author Notes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, in 1547. In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, he published his first major work as an author, the pastoral novel La Galatea which was poorly received.
Cervantes became a tax collector in Granada in 1594, but was imprisoned in 1597 due to money problems with the government. Folklore maintains that while in prison, he wrote his most famous novel, Don Quixote, which was an immediate success upon publication in 1605. After several years of writing short novels and plays, Cervantes was spurred to write the sequel to Don Quixote in 1615 when an unauthorized sequel appeared to great acclaim. Though Cervantes' sequel was rushed and flawed, Don Quixote remains a powerful symbol that has endured to present times in many forms.
Cervantes died on April 22, 1616, at the age of 69.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Horn Book Review
From the moment his mind snaps and he believes himself to be a knight, the idealistic Don Quixote seeks glorious adventures; he battles windmills, giants, an evil enchanter, and other knights. Harrison's condensed retelling retains the flavor of the original. Ambrus's pen-and-ink drawings and full-color illustrations are lively and vibrant. From HORN BOOK 1995, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 4-6. Harrison retells the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, choosing only a few key episodes to give young readers the flavor of the novel in a much shorter form. In the afterword, the writer explains what he has omitted, encourages readers to seek out the original, and recommends a good, complete English translation. Ambrus' artwork brightens nearly every page of the book. Among the illustrations are lively ink drawings, many with watercolor washes, and sensitive silhouettes of the two adventurers. Children will find this a fast-paced, readable introduction to Cervantes' novel. (Reviewed Feb. 1, 1996)0192741659Carolyn Phelan
School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-7-This retelling of episodes from the Cervantes classic starts a little slowly, but the pace picks up considerably once the proverb-spouting Sancho Panza makes his appearance. Harrison selects only a few key adventures; the afterword describes the sections that were left out. His language captures the style of the original, and the transitions are generally smooth. The afterword recommends a translation of the whole book and provides biographical information about the author. Ambrus's artwork is well suited to the story; he captures the personalities of both knight and squire without reducing them to caricatures. Glowing watercolors alternate with either black-and-white sketches or silhouettes. The oversized format with its clear type and good use of white space is appropriate to the folk-tale style, although it may not appeal to older readers. While there is debate about the appropriateness of retelling (or abridging) classics, there is also an audience for them, and Harrison's offering treats the original with respect.æDonna L. Scanlon, Lancaster County Library, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
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 disen chant 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 roman tic 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. To order Don Quixote for pounds 17 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-quixote.1 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 [Sancho 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 . . ." 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 roman tic 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. - AS Byatt.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Carole Slade's Introduction to Don Quixote In the first few pages of Don Quixote , Cervantes had his contemporaries laughing. King Philip III remarked of a student he spotted from his balcony bursting into fits of laughter while reading a book, "That student has either lost his wits or he is reading Don Quixote ." A courtier who went to investigate found that the young man was indeed reading Don Quixote . Even if apocryphal, the remark conveys the contagious hilarity with which Don Quixote infected seventeenth-century Spanish readers. What did they find so amusing? Understanding the continuing power of Don Quixote to entertain as well as to instruct begins with answering that question. Cervantes's contemporaries would have immediately recognized Don Quixote as a low-level member of the nobility struggling to keep up appearances, always a comical endeavor. His rusty lance and rotted shield, relics of the means by which his grandparents and their forebears had acquired land, wealth, and power, now serve only as ornaments on his walls. Far from living with the ease of a gentleman, the status to which he pretends, he is tightening his belt to the point of constriction. His skimpy diet, which consumes three-quarters of his income, his "skeleton of a horse," and "starved greyhound" suggest that he lives right on the edge of his financial means. In taking the title of don, which he does not merit because he does not own enough land, he follows a widespread practice of inflating rank with nothing more substantial than assertions. His fragile ego, which he always protects from admission of failure, suggests that he would have needed a way to avoid facing his financial bind and prospective social ruin. Like many Spaniards of his time, he finds an escape in books of chivalry. To buy his books of chivalry, Don Quixote has raised money in a way that a seventeenth-century audience would have found ludicrous: selling off good, potentially income-producing farmland. Engrossed in reading the books, he has let his house and holdings go to ruin, and he has given up hunting, a perennial pastime of Spanish aristocrats. On these points he is laughably imprudent; but soon it becomes clear that on the subject of chivalry, he has not merely gorged himself on books, but perhaps has lost his sanity. Over the course of the novel, readers slowly begin to reckon with the sobering idea that they could be laughing not at a clown or a fool, but at a lunatic, and what's more, that Don Quixote quite possibly reflects their own image back to them. In choosing not to anchor the novel in a specific time and place, Cervantes signals that his satire will be directed not only at Don Quixote but also at his contemporary Spaniards. Don Quixote is not the only one, Cervantes suggests, who lives in a laughable, and dangerous, fantasy world. Don Quixote was as topical in its time as the most recent broadcast of Saturday Night Live is today, and it has proved as timeless as Shakespeare's King Lear and Austen's Pride and Prejudice . Seventeenth-century Spaniards are not the only ones who cannot reconcile themselves to change and decline. In most of part I, especially in the first foray, the humor of Don Quixote remains relatively benign and broad. Consider, for example, Don Quixote's appearance. On the morning he rides out of his village on Rocinante, Don Quixote wears a full suit of rusted armor and a medieval helmet outfitted with a cardboard faceguard. In addition to being more than a century out of date, obviously jerry-rigged, and completely inappropriate for the intense July heat on the high plains of Castile, this outfit confines him to stiff, clumsy gestures reminiscent of the inflexible gait of the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz . Henri Bergson explains in his treatise on comedy, Laughter (1900), that "the artificial mechanization of the human body," the transformation of a human body into a "thing" by whatever means, costume or gesture, constitutes the stuff of physical comedy. Like the ungainly movements of the Tin Woodsman, which exhibit his lack of a heart, Don Quixote's armor, particularly his corroded helmet, represents the rigidity of his mind and spirit. He has created a self-image from books of chivalry, the accounts of heroic deeds of medieval knights, and he proceeds to treat the world as if it were the scene of such a romance. Spotting a very ordinary inn just at sunset, Don Quixote conjures up a castle. As our hero's imagination converted whatsoever he saw, heard or considered, into something of which he had read in books of chivalry; he no sooner perceived the inn, than his fancy represented it, as a stately castle with its four towers and pinnacles of shining silver, accommodated with a draw-bridge, deep moat, and all other conveniences, that are described as belonging to buildings of that kind. He hears the swineherd's horn call to round up his pigs as a trumpet salute to his arrival; he greets two women immediately recognizable as "ladies of the game," or prostitutes, as "high-born damsels"; and he addresses the innkeeper as "Castellano" (governor of the castle). Excerpted from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.