O, Don Quixote de la Mancha, cream and flower of knight errantry! Your adventures and exploits are endlessly entertaining and edifying!
This is a novel which can be taken at its own pace, sprawling, epic - but which most likely you will take much faster. I began reading the novel following the most recent film adaptation with John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins. I have been engrossed, enthralled, and enchanted since I picked up this antique tome. "Don Quixote" is not simply A novel - it is THE novel. In Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Cervantes gave, and continues to give two of the most beautifully rendered personalities, whom you come to know and treasure, and whose names will be "written in the book of fame for all future ages".
From the Duke and Duchess to the writer-convict Gines, to Sampson Carrasco and the priest, Cervantes portrays individuals, not just character-types, from all social backgrounds and contexts, enriching further the story of the Knight of the Sad Countenance and his faithful squire.
In terms of narrative, it is clear how "Don Quixote" influenced countless other works from Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" to Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man". "Don Quixote" is very much a narrative concerned with its own existence as a text. From Cervantes continually reminding the reader of his own duty as the translator of Quixote's adventures from Benengeli, to the Don's own preoccupation in the novel's second half with an "unauthorized biography" of himself written by a hack, to the various interpolated stories throughout the novel - narrative awareness and attention to the ways in which narrative and language functions are fascinating components of this work.
Perhaps the most important lessons the novel has to teach come from the mouth of the proverb-spitting Sancho Panza, whose physical presence underlines the substance of his words. Truly, Sancho is the novel's most intriguing character. His distance from, and simultaneous involvement in, Don Quixote's adventures give the novel an internal critic and observer, who pairs nicely with the external point of view provided by Cervantes.
In sum, "Don Quixote" is well worth your time - with short chapters, you can read a lot at once, or take it one bit at a time. Either way, pick this novel up, and let it become part of you.
