Don Quixote Kindle Edition

By Jay Kim, 8th gradeDon Quixote is the main character of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. He is the hero of the story, but he is certainly a strange one. Don Quixote starts as a poor and elderly noble who reads books for pleasure. These books of chivalry drive him insane, and lead him to believe that he must revive the profession of knight errantry. Before losing his sanity, Don Quixote was named Alonso Quixano, but he named himself Don Quixote to suit the role he is playing of a knight errant. Don is a spanish title and Quixote is a section of armor that covers the thigh. His face is described as being very long and serious, and he is very gaunt and tall. Throughout the book, Don Quixote is ridiculed by many but he never seems to notice. He also has a sense of chivalry as he wants to embody the idea of a knight errant, trying to right wrongs and using force when force is needed. Knight errants are thought to be courageous, and Don Quixote is nothing but courageous. Throughout his adventures, he almost never fails to confront his fears and right perceived wrongs although doing so loses him several teeth and a part of his ear. It is also remarked many times that apart from anything related to chivalry, Don Quixote is perfectly sane and intelligent. In fact, throughout the book he gives many admirable speeches and many morals that I agree with. I admire Don Quixote because even though he is elderly and can live off his estate as a noble, he refuses to do so and becomes a knight errant. Yes, this is because he is not completely sane but he is trying to do good for others.Sancho Panza is Don Quixote’s poor peasant neighbor. Poor, but fat and short. For whatever reason, Sancho agrees to be Don Quixote’s squire even though Don Quixote is quite obviously mad. He plays a counterpart to Don Quixote, behaving cowardly when Don Quixote is rushing forward to meet his imaginary enemies, and greedy to Don Quixote’s apparent non-materialism. But he sticks through all of Don Quixote’s adventures next to him, and he seems to regard the knight errant as a very good friend by the book’s end. Sancho Panza tries to do the best for his family, bringing money from the adventure back to them, and his donkey, being very careful not to lose him. Sancho Panza is also extremely simpleminded, as evident by him agreeing to be a squire to Don Quixote. Also, his proverbs, of which he has many, are always off the mark and make no sense. However, he is not without his moments, as when he becomes a governor he creates several very intelligent laws that are followed even after he leaves his position. I like Sancho Panza because he gives humor to the story with his strange acts and simple mindedness. You can also sense a bond growing between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote through the story, and I really enjoy seeing their friendship grow.The Barber is an un named character in Don Quixote who is a friend of Don Quixote. They seem to be good friends, although the barber does enjoy poking fun at Don Quixote at times. His friend the Priest is also a good friend of Don Quixote, and the Barber seems to defer to the Priest’s judgement a lot. There is not much to be said about the Barber except that he is a true friend of Don Quixote.The Priest is an un named character in Don Quixote who is a friend of Don Quixote. He graduated from what is said to be a bad college, but he seems quite intelligent. He takes pride in being a priest, one time saying that he refuses to wear a the clothing of a women because he would dishonor priests. His friend the Barber defers to him in many matters of judgement. Books of chivalry seem to be a pet peeve to the priest since they have so changed his friend, Don Quixote, and he also seems to find many of them distasteful since they are so unreal as to not give him any enjoyment in reading them. I agree with him about chivalry novels and generally think he is another true friend to Don Quixote.The Niece of Don Quixote is a woman who loves Don Quixote as a family member and tries to care for him when he is sick. Their familial bond and love is further shown when Don Quixote gives her land in his will. The Niece tries her best to stop Don Quixote from going out on adventures, but it’s for his own good. I feel she is not trying hard enough, however, since Don Quixote manages to go out and have adventures a total of three times.The Housekeeper for Don Quixote is similar to his Niece in that both care for him. In fact, the Housekeeper continues working for Don Quixote even when he is gone on his adventures and doesn’t pay her. She just wants the best for Don Quixote, and I think that is an admirable thing.Dulcinea of Toboso is the name Don Quixote gives to a peasant girl he had a crush on when he was young. Her real name is Aldonza Lorenzo, but Don Quixote decides he needs a maiden to serve and so changes her name to better fit that. They never meet in the book, but it is said she was pretty when she was young. I am not sure what to think of her as there is not much information about her, but she must be a good person if Don Quixote likes her so much.Cardenio is a man who runs away to die alone when he hears his beloved marries another. Eventually, it is found that this was not true and he goes back and presumably marries her. I think Cardenio had a hard life and I am glad his story ends happily.Luscinda is Cardenio’s sweetheart who refused an offer of marriage even though she was pressed into accepting it by many. She is considered inordinately beautiful, and it is said her beauty was matched only by Dorotea. There is not much said about her, but she remains faithful to her sweetheart so I admire her for that.Don Fernando is a rich noble who said he loved Dorotea, but then tried to marry Luscinda. Of course, he was also Cardenio’s good friend until he tried to steal away Luscinda. He eventually agrees to marry Dorotea and it is presumed they live happily ever after. I think Don Fernando is a womanizer and quite rude, since he broke his promise to Dorotea.Dorotea is the rich daughter of a peasant family. When Don Fernando ran away from his obligations to her, she was so ashamed that she ran away. Eventually, she found Don Fernando and they married. She is considered to be as beautiful as Luscinda, and very intelligent for she managed to get Don Fernando to marry her. I like that Dorotea’s story ended happily because she seems like a good person.The Duke and Duchess are characters in the second part of Don Quixote who, having read the first part, decide to play tricks on Don Quixote and his squire for their amusement. These tricks are not very nice, but they are funny and the Duke and Duchess seem to genuinely like both Don Quixote and his squire. In fact, they even gift Sancho Panza with a town to govern, although he loses his job after a mere 10 days. I like the Duke and Duchess since they are basically harmless and just play a lot of jokes that are a little funny.The Knight of the Green Coat is a person Don Quixote meets on the road. The Knight invites him to his house, and so Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stay there for a while. The Knight seems to be a rich farmer, and his real name is Don Diego de Miranda. He and his son believe that Don Quixote is sometimes intelligent and other times mad. His son aspires to be a famous poet. I think that this Knight is a nice guy for allowing Don Quixote to stay at his house, but I wish that Don Quixote had a chance to tell the Knight his adventures after the knight errant parted ways with Don Diego. Unfortunately, Don Quixote dies at the end of the book so I don’t think this will ever happen.Bachelor Sanson Carrasco is a bachelor of a university. He, along with the Priest and Barber, plan to stop Don Quixote’s madness. Sanson dresses as a knight and fights Don Quixote, so that the loser must proclaim the winner’s maiden as the most beautiful, but he loses. He is not daunted by this loss, however, and he meets Don Quixote again near the end of the book to fight him. This time he wins, and it is considered that the depression brought about by this defeat led to Don Quixote’s death. I think Sanson’s cause is worthy, but the end result is utterly sad.Connection:I chose this project because I like reading, and I thought that this would take less effort and be more enjoyable than the other options. The other options just sounded like work, while reading sounded more like resting. The Ingenious Gentlemen of La Mancha influenced spanish culture because so many people read the book and enjoyed it. This led them to incorporate the book into plays and art. Don Quixote helped me understand a little more about spanish . For example, footnotes in the book indicate that Don Quixote uses more formal language to indicate anger at Sancho Panza, but this formal language is not seen in the translation. English and spanish have differences, and Don Quixote helped me see that more clearly.Reflection:I learned a little about the spanish language, but mostly I learned about knight errantry and some of the culture of Spain. I felt bored for some parts of the book, like through the sonnets and poems, but otherwise I felt engaged and understood most of it. I do think that I would recommend this project to another student because I feel like I had fun reading Don Quixote and there was little to no effort involved. Footnotes increased my understanding of the text, so if someone has a copy of the book with footnotes I think they should definitely give it a try. However, the reading did consume a lot of time, so if people don’t have a lot of time they should not do this project. I planned it so that I would read 50 pages a day for several weeks, but it turned out that it was very hard to keep to this schedule. I think a better way would be to read 300 pages on the weekends so the reading doesn’t interfere with schoolwork but it still gets done. At some points in the book, I wasn’t sure if I liked the book or not, but when I finished the book I felt sad so I guess that means I liked the book after all. Honestly, I feel that it was worth it to experience what people have called the, “first modern novel”.

Enchanting ErrancyDon Quixote is the greatest novel ever, marking a decisive point in the emergence of the modern mind and setting the foundation for methods of satire, drama, comedy and cultural analysis. Old-fashioned style can make great classics less accessible. Edith Grossman's superb translation of Don Quixote completely overcomes this problem, with a reading as modern and engaging as anything written today.The Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote, sets his own rational but groundless imagination against the power of observation by the senses, achieving a hallucinatory faith that his waking dreams are real. His power to convince himself that flocks of sheep are armies and windmills are giants mocks all imaginative stories that conflict with evidence. Cervantes is decisively modern in his assertion that evidence is a stronger guide than authority, a suggestion strongly at odds with church dogma. Don Quixote is an absurd literary character. With this magnificent creation, Cervantes is a pioneer in the modern disjunction between observation and cognition. Absurdity emerges in his fictional satire of traditional values.Cervantes created Quixote with close attention to the opportunity afforded for a study of the psychology of madness. The source of Quixote's insanity is said to be his love of chivalry, and chivalric literature, and his resulting desire to live the noble life of a knight errant. The picture painted is of a madman fantasizing about armed service to defend the needy in a land at peace. The military knight in arms was a throwback to the medieval time and the Dark Ages of the Gothic conquest of Spain. However, what is the subtext?Spain had conquered South America in consort with Portugal a century before Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, through force of arms and disease. So, the picture of a man at arms in Spain was not as anachronistic as Cervantes paints, but merely displaced across the Atlantic Ocean. The adventures of Quixote and his trusty servant Sancho Panza bear comparison with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas. The tradition of chivalry seemed irrelevant from the civil society perspective of mercantile Spain, but at that very time, military leaders steeped in a chivalric tradition, but willing to employ any means for conquest and plunder, were expanding the Spanish Empire on behalf of the Crown and people of Spain. Military conquest on such large scale requires a touch of Quixotic madness.Many stories from chivalry inform Don Quixote. One is The Madness of Sir Lancelot. A motif borrowed by Cervantes from this tale is the knight wearing only a ragged shirt who is lost by himself in the wilderness for love of a beautiful woman. Don Quixote copies this and other actions of Lancelot, going above and beyond the legacy of the father of the grail knight by performing several cartwheels while in his state of melancholy undress, as part of his quest to typify knighthood.Don Quixote has my sympathy. Sent mad by reading too many fictitious old books, he stands as the embodiment of chivalrous virtue (except for his murderous actions) in an age of squalor. The absurdity inherent in maintaining chivalrous values in a world of modern machines is captured by the famous story of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill, breaking his lance and being tossed from his horse by the turning blade. Using absurdity to mock chivalry is a method that inspired an illustrious modern tradition of satire. The British comedians Monty Python borrow from Cervantes in important respects in the movie The Quest for the Holy Grail. Python King Arthur's lines are modeled on Quixote's formal mode of address, and the Black Knight copies Quixote in seeking to prevent the passage of innocent travelers by threatening death by sword and collapsing into madness and absurdity in his "none shall pass" caper.Cervantes points out that his writing method, claiming to improve an Arabic text of unknown provenance, shares much with the chronicles of chivalry. We might note his method shares much with older texts as well, such as the Bible, that are also reputed to be history, and that have as much claim to be fact as the celebrated Man of La Mancha. It is always helpful to claim that a book (like the Bible) is 'based on a true story', and this method is at the core of Cervantes' satirical style. Cervantes takes the opportunity of his entertaining buffoonery to satirise the entire courtly world of Holy Spain, safe in the modern confidence that his deft style can deflect any claims of impiety and other unwelcome attention from censors and critics.At one point, a priest and a servant conspire to burn all Don Quixote's books. The book burning drips with irony. The reader is invited to think, if reading books is this bad, why did Cervantes write such a fat book, so full of literary allusions, and why the hell am I reading it? I'm sure there is a strong political message in this episode, as book burning was associated with the auto-da-fe, the 'act of faith' where the Inquisition burnt heretics at the stake. Cervantes is condemning book burning as the act of idiots, with the vacillation of the priest showing his recognition that his complicity was an immoral piece of cultural vandalism. The overt message of the book-burning is that Don Quixote has sent himself mad by reading rubbishy fiction books and believing they are factual, therefore any sensible person will avoid reading entirely and will stick to practical activity. However, Cervantes himself is obviously steeped in this chivalric tradition that he affects to despise, and seems to think people can learn something from tales of knight errantry, perhaps rather like the popular pulp romances of today which may give psychological insights for all their formulaic wish-fulfillment. So the irony is that the surface language of the book-burning episode presents the consignment to the flames as a necessary and ethical task, while just below the surface is the disturbing sense that here we see wanton vandalism and loss of values that the destroyers (except the priest) are unable to comprehend.The deeper irony is the critique of Christian theology. Christians have been among the greatest book-burners in history, largely responsible for the amnesia of the dark ages which set the scene for knight errantry, such as the legendary burning of the great classical library of Alexandria in Egypt. Cervantes is reconstructing a continuity with classical civilization. Stories from Homer and Ovid were common coin among the literary elite of his day but are now forgotten by our contemporary equivalents of book burners. Christians, by believing in miracles, are just like Don Quixote, and deserve the same level of incredulity about their insanity as his amazed onlookers give to the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. But the Bible was off limits for mockery. Don Quixote himself later says he would like to burn at the stake anyone who suggests that chivalric literature is not 100% factual. So the surface message is that Christian civilization can mock the fantasy world of chivalry, but the unstated irony is that Christianity is just as fantastic as the delusions it mocks.

Great!+❤️+

This review pertains to the Vintage Classics paperback edition. The novel is of course brilliant and hilarious! The translation reads very well with helpful footnotes. My beef is that the margins closest to the binding (eg, the right margin on even-numbered pages) are too narrow. Unless you have a perfect light source, the words closest to the binding are in shadow, so one either needs to break the binding to open the book up more on each page, or contort themselves and/or the book in order to get good light on these words. ON EVERY PAGE, mind you. A regrettable, sadly avoidable, major defect. Hopefully they'll fix it on the next printing.

This book has been around for centuries and is still great today.

The item arrived all torn up but after contacting customer support we were sent another copy! This was a gift for our neighbor and he loved it! Great quality paperback copy. Truly a classic.

I had been reading the old J.M. Cohen translation, which has been superseded by Rutherford at Penguin. Cohen's copy is small and the text is miniscule; the syntax and sentences were also old-fashioned and hard to read. After buying Grossman's edition, I cannot believe I suffered through 400 pages of Cohen's. If you're going to buy Don Quixote, buy this version.

"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes isn't just a novel; it's a literary masterpiece that transcends time, inviting readers into the labyrinth of imagination and challenging the very fabric of reality. This iconic work, often regarded as the first modern European novel, is a tapestry of wit, adventure, and profound insight that continues to captivate hearts across generations. "Don Quixote" is a literary treasure that continues to enchant and provoke thought centuries after its creation. Cervantes' magnum opus is more than a novel; it's an odyssey into the boundless realms of the human mind. If you seek a journey that combines humor, wisdom, and the enduring power of storytelling, "Don Quixote" beckons you to mount your proverbial steed and set forth into the timeless landscape of literary exploration.

Cervantes' masterpiece isn't at all what I thought it might be. For one, the tale is told without pomposity but in a register so knowing that the idea that he invented the modernist novel is hardly fanciful. The characters learn things as they go along, and have complex dispositions and motivations themselves as well as a dry commentary on their actions conducted from above that draws our attention to their flaws and graces. Whilst their exploits are often quite funny, there is a far more serious point being made about reality and how to live an unconventional existence and its consequences (something Cervantes knew all too well). Danger to life and limb is never avoided, indeed often actively sought as the pre-condition of the bravery the Don aspires to in order to live up to his own expectations. Those seeking to disabuse him of his delusions are often drawn into them, or find themselves converted to another way of thinking, and even those who start off scornful of him end up desolate at his passing. This is because there really is a better way to be, and the Don's total commitment to his cause can't help but inspire. A great read, worth the hours it requires, rewarding in humour, truthfulness, sorrow and lessons in human nature. Wonderful annotated translation as well.

It arrived a bit damaged

Belle histoire et belle traduction !