Don Quixote

Product Description

Widely regarded as the world`s first modern novel, & one of the funniest & most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha & his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. The book is simultaneously a work whose authentic subject is literature & a chronicle of a hard, sordid actuality, the declining Spain of 1605-15. Confronting the conventions of Spanish society at his time some four hundred years ago, Miguel De Cervantes wittily & funnily exposes the follies of the time through the adventures, stories & misfortunes of these knight & servant.” The Spanish Bible”, as Miguel de Unamuno called it, Don Quixote is Cervantes`s subtle critique of a realm that had given him only harsh measures in return for his own patriotic heroism. His magnificent knight`s quest has cosmological scope & reverberation, making it the greatest of all narratives. This new edition claims to present the definite translation. Edith Grossman`s quality of diction & extraordinary prose marvellously highlights the spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline. Also worth mentioning is the wonderful illustration by Pablo Picasso on the front cover.” Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance & ancient shield on a shelf & keeps a skinny nag & a greyhound for racing. [...] His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, & other impossible foolishness, & he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent & false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.”
- Miguel De Cervantes