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Brimming with romance and adventure, Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote is considered by many to be the greatest work in the Spanish literary canon. Both humane and humorous, the two volume oeuvre centres on the adventures of the self-styled knight errant Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Quixote's credulous and chubby squire. Together the unlikely pair of heroes bumble their way from one bizarre adventure to another fueled in their quests by Quixote's histrionic world view and Sancho's, who in conjunction with Quixote provides the spark for endlessly bizarre discussions in which Quixote's heightened, insane conception of the world is brought crashing to earth by Sancho's common sense.
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)
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.
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.
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).
A very strange book that suddenly opened up what literature could be. The aspect I find most important is how deeply the book is dealing with consciousness even under the guise of a kind of satire.
I found the book extremely entertaining as well but also extremely repetitive after the first half. ( )
It feels silly to try and write anything about a book that’s been a world classic for going on 500 years. It was illuminating to read that Dostoyevsky considered Don Quixote a big inspiration for his The Idiot. The titular characters of the two books have a lot in common. Like Prince Myshkin, Quixote is taken as an imbecile for his sheer earnestness and sensitivity. Both books show us how someone who actually adheres to the standards of goodness and heroism depicted in idealized art is actually kind of insane, or else just kind of stupid. And yet, it is a stupidity that has some kind of lasting appeal. I think anyone who has ever been carried away by a work of art, or an intoxicating idea can sympathize with Don Quixote - to live in a world of fantasy may be folly, but it’s usually a lot more interesting than real life. Part of Cervantes genius here is how cohesive his project remains even over almost 1000 pages of digression and errantry. Don Quixote the book is exactly like Don Quixote the character - at turns silly and perceptive, long-winded but always entertaining, and caught up in a search for a kind of sublimation that so often gets dragged down to earthly concerns.
Quite simply the greatest novel ever written, and the most provocative meditation on the meaning of life. Funny, gross, stirring, sad, tragic, joyous. It has everything. And it was written by a man sitting in a jail cell of the Ottoman Sultan. ( )
[John Rutherford’s] effort, in fact, is something of a triumph: for the first time, we are given a chance to read the novel as Cervantes intended it, in other words as the comic masterpiece it undoubtedly is; and it is hard to believe that his version will be surpassed for many generations.
Brimming with romance and adventure, Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote is considered by many to be the greatest work in the Spanish literary canon. Both humane and humorous, the two volume oeuvre centres on the adventures of the self-styled knight errant Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Quixote's credulous and chubby squire. Together the unlikely pair of heroes bumble their way from one bizarre adventure to another fueled in their quests by Quixote's histrionic world view and Sancho's, who in conjunction with Quixote provides the spark for endlessly bizarre discussions in which Quixote's heightened, insane conception of the world is brought crashing to earth by Sancho's common sense.
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The peril of books Chivalric elder abuse Candid Camera? (captainfez)
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GROUP READ - Don Quixote: Part 2, Book 1
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5
I found the book extremely entertaining as well but also
extremely repetitive after the first half. (