Book Review - Don Quixote

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Arms, my only ornament.

My only rest, the fight.

~Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes

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Published: 1605

Author: Miguel Cervantes

Genres:  Novel, Parody, Satire, Farce, Psychological Fiction

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, 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 has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential 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."

~Goodreads

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It has been quite a long time since I thoroughly - in the truest sense of the word - enjoyed a novel as I have Don Quixote. While its length, standing at a towering 1000 pages and 74 chapters, at first intimidated me, after about chapter eight, with the infamous windmill scene, I was thoroughly hooked, like Don Quixote himself hooked on his fantasy of being a knight errant. Widely accepted as the first modern novel, the adventures of Don Quixote and his trusty squire Sancho Panza, are comical, educational, gripping and outright amusing to name a few superlatives.

I read the translation by John Rutherford, whom more educated and knowing people than me agree that it does the original Spanish text the most justice, and so well articulated, so lofty are the interlocutions that one who appreciates the art of writing is left amazed by some of the dialogues one hears, of some of the commentaries the oddest characters make, and finally, the simultaneous madness and ingenuity of Don Quixote and the proverbial simplicity of his squire. The chivalric language used in dialogue was a welcome sight to me, myself being biased towards the poetry of days gone by.  When a book is so good that its protagonist's name become a commonplace adjective (see Quixotism), one must take notice.

  In the book, the author uses a clever literally technique where he attributes the writing to one fictitous character who is a writer in the book, Cide Hamete Benengeli, and continuously gives praise to this Cide for relating the history of Don Quixote De La Mancha. In doing so, he creates a  metaphysical technique that further enforces the authenticity of events that take place, fictitious though they may be. He even goes so far as to say a second history was written of the adventures of our protagonist, only for it to be lambasted as an inauthentic and false recounting of the tales of chivalry undertaken. The layers and layers of thought and reference that went into Don Quixote truly makes it earn its place at the pinnacle of world literature. If one central theme persists in this momentous work, it is the human need to withstand suffering in pursuit of one's ambitions. In the name of his peerless, matchless beauty, Dulcinea Del Toboso - Don Quixote rides into the unforgiving world to aid those who need aid, succour maidens in distress, and rescue people from the jaws of death. Likewise, his not too bright squire, Sancho Panza, is ready to sleep on grass fields, live on nuts and berries and accept various blanket tossing and thumping all for the hope that he will receive the governorship of an island or city that his master promised.

Illustration by Gustave Dore

  Yet interspersed amidst the farcical and humourous narratives, are nuggets of divine wisdom regarding many topics such as arms vs letters, love, death, God and nationality. Like the characters in the novel, the reader is also left amazed at the practicality of Don Quixote's speech, the wisdom he shows and the way in which he expresses his opinions. The chapter where Don Quixote narrates all the good qualities and avoidable vices that a governor should possess to his squire Sancho Panza, stands in equal measure as Proverbs in The Bible. The comedic element comes in when he immediately follows it with an act of complete madness, like trying to fight lions or charging at windmills thinking they are giants.

After enough of the story has been built, one grips each chapter and waits giddy in anticipation for what new exploit or adventure this most chivalrous of knights goes through, and what remarks and proverbs will the holy fool, Sancho Panza say. If you manage to pick up this novel in your lifetime, dear reader, consider yourself blessed for you are about to gain countless hours of joy in the brilliant, ingenious mind of one Spaniard, Miguel Cervatnes.