Don Quixote (1615) by Miguel de Cervantes

A statue of Don Quixote stands in Madrid.

Book Review
Don Quixote (1615)
 by Miguel de Cervantes

    Don Quixote is actually an original novel and a sequel, published a decade apart.  Don Quixote is a massive, protean, seminal and canonical work- called "the first canonical novel" on its glorious wikipedia page, and nearly one thousand pages in printed form (and forty hours long as an Audiobook in the edition I checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library.)  Like Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote is one of those books that manages to be "post-modern" centuries before modernism had established itself, let alone post-modernism.

  Specifically, the second volume of the single book known today as the one novel, was written a decade after the first book, and in the universe of the second novel, people have read the first book, and Don Quixote has gained fame for the misadventures of his first book.  Indeed, the plot of the entire second volume is driven forward by a local Duke and Duchess who are great fans of the first volume of Don Quixote's adventures, and use their wealth and leisure to construct a series of increasingly outrageous stunts and pranks, up to and including making Sancho Panza the "Governor" of an island in their territory.

   The first volume is more straight forward, consisting mainly of two separate forays by Quixote into his surroundings, where he is frequently confused, baffled and mislead by friends, foes and complete strangers, including his own squire, Sancho Panza.  Quixote's ultimate tormentors are, in his mind, some nameless "Enchanters" who are capable of changing what Quixote perceives, so, for example, he might see a farm maid and be told by other that she is his long-sought after Princess.  Throughout Quixote, the nature of reality is called into question in a fashion that immediately brings to mind some of the basic principles of so-called "post-modern" literature.

    These days, Quixote, along with other thousand page titans of pre 19th century literature, have fallen into disuse outside the academy.  Even in universities, my sense is that the length of Quixote prevents it from being frequently taught. One thousand pages in print is enough to scare off even the most hardened fan of canonical literature.  As an Audiobook, on the other hand, Quixote was very digestible.  Most of the book is spoken dialogue, well adapted for the Audiobook format, and the picaresque form of the narrative makes following along easy considering the age of the text.