Book review
Don Quixote
Cervantes turns a knight’s impossible adventures into a lasting conversation about stories and reality.
This review discusses plot developments, including the ending.
Four centuries on, Don Quixote is still the novel every other novel seems to be quietly arguing with. Cervantes set out to mock the chivalric romances that were the pulp fiction of his day, and in doing so he invented something far bigger: a book about how stories shape the way we see the world, and what happens when someone believes them completely.
The premise is simple. Alonso Quixano, a minor gentleman from La Mancha, reads so many tales of knights errant that he decides to become one. He renames himself Don Quixote, dons rusty armour, mounts a bony horse he calls Rocinante, and recruits a local farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire with the promise of an island to govern. Then he rides out to right wrongs that mostly do not exist, charging at windmills he takes for giants and flocks of sheep he takes for armies.
The early adventures are broad slapstick, and Quixote is beaten, mocked and humiliated again and again. But the comedy deepens as the book goes on. The real heart of the novel is the conversation between knight and squire: the idealist who cannot see the world as it is, and the earthy realist who sees nothing else. Over hundreds of pages they rub off on each other, until Sancho starts to dream and Quixote starts to doubt. It is one of the great friendships in literature.
Part II, published a decade after the first, is the more astonishing half. By then Part I was a bestseller, and Cervantes lets his characters know it: people they meet have read about them, and a cruel duke and duchess stage elaborate pranks to exploit the famous madman. A spurious sequel by another writer had appeared in the meantime, and Cervantes folds that into the story too. The result is a remarkably early exploration of fiction commenting on its own creation.
The book has real demands. It is very long, and Part I is padded with interpolated stories, pastoral episodes and novellas that many modern readers will want to skim. The humour can be repetitive, and the physical cruelty inflicted on Quixote is harder to laugh at today than it was in 1605. A good modern translation, such as Edith Grossman’s, makes an enormous difference.
What lingers is the ending, quiet and unexpectedly moving, and the question the whole book keeps asking: is it better to see the world clearly, or to live as though it could be nobler than it is?