Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Summary
Alonso Quixano, a country gentleman in La Mancha, reads so many romances of chivalry that he comes to believe them, renames himself Don Quixote, and rides out to right wrongs that mostly do not exist. He recruits a farm labourer, Sancho Panza, as his squire with the promise of an island to govern, and the two of them proceed through Spain mistaking windmills for giants and inns for castles, beaten and humiliated at nearly every stop, and somehow never diminished by it. The second part, published a decade after the first, plays a trick that still feels audacious: the characters Quixote meets have read part one, so the knight travels through a world that already knows his story.
What surprises first time readers is how funny it is, and how the joke keeps changing hands. For stretches you laugh at the mad knight; then Sancho, the supposed realist, starts believing; then you notice the sane characters are crueller than the deluded one, and the book has quietly reversed on you. It is long, and the interpolated tales in part one test modern patience, but the two central figures carry it, talking to each other across every chapter in one of the great double acts in fiction.
At the end Quixote comes home, recovers his wits, renounces the whole adventure as Alonso Quixano, and dies, a sane man mourned by readers who preferred him mad. The book gave English the word quixotic and the phrase tilting at windmills, and it earned them.
Historical Context & Significance
Part one appeared in January 1605 and succeeded immediately; an English translation followed within seven years, and French, German and Italian versions appeared over the following two decades, and many copies of the small first printing were shipped to the Americas. In 1614 a writer using the name Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published a false sequel, which pushed Cervantes to finish his own part two by 1615, and he took his revenge inside the novel itself, where characters dismiss the impostor's version.
Its standing has only grown. In 2002 the Norwegian Book Clubs polled a hundred leading writers from around fifty four countries, who each named ten works, and Don Quixote received half as many votes again as any other book on the resulting list, and it is routinely called the first modern novel. With more than a thousand editions and an estimated half a billion copies sold, it remains the defining work of Spanish literature.