Read For Free The History Of Don Quixote (Classic Reprint) Articulated By Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra Made Available In Paper Copy

Don Quixote. "In a certain corner of la Mancha, the name of which I do not choose to remember, there lately lived one of those country gentleman, who adorn their halls with rusty lace and wormeaten target, and ride forth on the skeleton of a horse, to course with a sort of a starved greyhound.
"

Don Quixote is one of my favorite comedies of all time, This opening phrase is steeped with irony and sarcasm, We are introduced to the loser town which the author is obviously embarrassed to have known and an out of date rusty and poor wormeaten country gentleman read "redneck" and given a less than a complimentary portrait of his magnificent steed, Rocinante starved greyhound.
Cervantes chooses to reveal himself from the getgo "I" and stays with us during the entire two volumes of timeenduring text that is his literary legacy to us, This is also evident from the long and rambling sentence form, There is gallantry ride forth and pretention adorn their halls and yet a sort of hopelessness skeleton of a horse that infuses this sentence with a life of its own.
And, the rest only gets better,

I think my favorite moment and one of the more existential moments which make this truly a modern book was when Don Quixote is suspended in air at Dolcinea's window, Riconante having wandered off eating grass.
The entire work is full of comedy and humor, And don't miss the second part which he wrote because after publishing Part, life dealt him some harsh cards soldiering wounds, prison, bankruptcy, exile, . . during which a grifter wrote a sequel using his name and his characters, He was so insensed that he wrote a sequel and killed off Quixote so that there could be no more imitators, Incredible stuff.

The DoubleEdged Sword

It is a doubleedged sword isn't it, reading great books too early in life

If we read a book too early in life, we may not grasp it fully but the book becomes part of us and forms a part of our thinking itself, maybe even of our writing.
But on the other hand, the reading is never complete and we may never come back to it, in a world too full of books,

And if we wait to read till we are mature, we will never become good readers and writers who can do justice to good books, . . so we have to read some good books early and do injustice to them, Only then can we do justice to ourselves and to great books later on,

sitelinkOne is reminded of Calvino in Why Read the Classics when we meditate on this,

Now the question is which books to do the injustice to and which the justice, Do we select the best for the earliest so that they become a part of us or do we leave the very best for later so that we can enjoy them to the fullest

Tough choice.
I have never been able to resolve, Have you I guess the goal of reviewing something like Don Quixote is to make you less frightened of it, It's intimidating, right It'spages long and it's fromyears ago, But Grossman's translation is modern and easy to read, and the work itself is so much fun that it ends up not being difficult at all,

Much of Book I is concerned with the story of Cardenio, which Shakespeare apparently liked so much that he wrote a nowlost play about the guy, I loved that part, but for me, the pace slowed down a bit in the latter third of Book I, There are two more "novellas" inserted that have little or nothing to do with the plot feel free to skip them, They're discussed in the comments section sitelinkbelow this review, if you're interested,

Book II was published ten years after Book I, in, and with it Cervantes pulls a typically Cervantesesque trick: he imagines that Don Quixote is now a celebrity due to Book I's success.
This changes the perspective considerably whereas folks used to be mystified by Don Quixote, now they often recognize him, which generally results in them fucking with him, It invigorates the story since Book II feels so different, I didn't get the feeling I often get with wicked long books where I kinda get bogged down around the/mark.
In fact, I ended up liking Book II even better than Book I,

Quixote messes with your head, Cervantes pulls so many tricks out of his bag that you're never sure what's coming next, For a while I suspected that sitelinkthe footnotes had been written by Cervantes as well, and were all made up, I had to

Wikipedia Martin de Riquer to make sure he was a real guy, That's how sneaky Cervantes is: he makes you think sitelinkanything is possible,

I thought Don Quixote was tremendous, It's like nothing else in the world, I'm glad I read it, And I'll end with what might be the best quote of all time, and a brilliant thing to say to your wife:

"I want you to see me naked and performing one or two dozen mad acts, which will take me less than half an hour, because if you have seen them with your own eyes, you can safely swear to any others you might wish to add.
"

Right Don Quixote kicks ass,

By the way, for another take on the story, here's Kafka:

Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody.
A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

This is the entire text of his parable "The Truth about Sancho Panza" it and others can be found sitelinkhere, In this episodic tale, a neverending story of great fun, Cervantes invites us to laugh at the madness of his hero, The head of the latter was stuffed with those absurdities that we find in chivalry novels very popular wildly in Spain betweenand, where everyone liked to listen to it we read it publicly or read it, the people as well of the crowned heads.

A hilarious parody of chivalry novels, an honest social critic when the Spanish power is experiencing a decisive crisis, Don Quixote is also a gratifying work, perhaps because it has much to do with the eventful life of Cervantes.
Who was wounded during the victorious battle of Lepanto against the Turks and later imprisoned in Algiers for five long years awaiting redemption
These are traumatic episodes that were, unfortunately, followed by others.
But Cervantes encountered family, professional and financial difficulties, These were undoubtedly not foreign to the tender irony and the fundamental kindness brought to his characters, who of a work of unmatchable modernity have it, It made an unforgettable masterpiece of profound humanity,
One last word for that great Portuguese prose writer, the translator of this outstanding work Aquilino Ribeiro, All the chivalric romance is long dead and gone But the travesty Don Quixote is alive and kicking The strange ones are the fittest

the castellan brought out the book in which he had jotted down the hay and barley for which the mule drivers owed him, and, accompanied by a lad bearing the butt of a candle and the two aforesaid damsels, he came up to where Don Quixote stood and commanded him to kneel.
Reading from the account book as if he had been saying a prayer he raised his hand and, with the knights own sword, gave him a good thwack upon the neck and another lusty one upon the shoulder, muttering all the while between his teeth.
He then directed one of the ladies to gird on Don Quixotes sword, which she did with much gravity and composure for it was all they could do to keep from laughing at every point of the ceremony, but the thought of the knights prowess which they had already witnessed was sufficient to restrain their mirth.

As soon as the mocking accolade is over Don Quixote is off to fight evil, to defeat monsters, to perform feats and to save damsels in distress

“And if,” said Sancho, “those gentlemen wish to know who the valiant one was who did this to them, your Grace may inform them that he is the famous Don Quixote de la Mancha, otherwise known as the Knight of the Mournful Countenance.
”
At this the knight inquired of his squire what had led him to call him by such a title at that particular moment,
“I can tell you,” said Sancho, “I was looking at you for a time by the light of the torch that poor fellow carried and truly, your Grace now has the worstlooking countenance that I have ever seen, whether due to exhaustion from this combat or the lack of teeth and grinders, I cannot say.
”

The valorous life of knighterrant is full of hardship so every new feat brings a new sorrow,
The grandiose epic continues: Sancho Panza plays his role of the squire and governor Don Quixote plays his role of the valiant hero and all the rest play the roles of his adversaries or allies Adventures, quests, mishaps and show go on

“One plays the ruffian, another the cheat, this one a merchant and that one a soldier, while yet another is the fool who is not so foolish as he appears, and still another the one of whom love has made a fool.
Yet when the play is over and they have taken off their players garments, all the actors are once more equal, ”
“Yes,” replied Sancho, “I have seen all that, ”
“Well,” continued Don Quixote, “the same thing happens in the comedy that we call life, where some play the part of emperors, others that of pontiffs in short, all the characters that a drama may have but when it is all over, that is to say, when life is done, death takes from each the garb that differentiates him, and all at last are equal in the grave.
”

Many brave knights fought dragons and won but no one remembers their names Don Quixote fought just a single windmill and even if he failed to defeat it, everyone knows him.
.