Don Quixote

DLSmithies: Don Quixote was Flaubert's favourite book, and I've read somewhere that the idea of Madame Bovary is to re-tell the story of Don Quixote in a different context. Don Quixote is obsessed with chivalric literature, and immerses himself in it to the extent that he loses his grip on reality. Emma Bovary is bewitched by Romantic literature in the same way. There are lots of parallels between the two novels, and I think putting them side by side can lead to a better understanding of both.… (more)

hdcclassic: A modern-day retelling.

g026r: The spurious continuation, published in 1614 while Cervantes was still working on his own Part II and which affected that work to a significant degree.

CGlanovsky: In several of his critical essays Borges makes insightful and unique mention of Don Quixote sometimes directly and sometimes in reference to other works.

Lirmac: References to then-famous romances, such as this one by Ariosto, provide much of the humour in Don Quixote. In addition to enriching Cervantes' work, Orlando Furioso is entertaining in its own right (especially in this modern verse translation).

CGlanovsky: Read the two concurrently and got a good sense of the kind of chivalric literature that gave birth to Quixote's madness.

TheLittlePhrase: protagonists who struggle to differentiate between reality & the books that they read

CGlanovsky: Misguided protagonist gets into a series of misadventures