ASSIGNMENT

BOOK REVIEW OF DON QUIXOTE

SUBMITTED BY:

M.UMAR SOHAIL
L1S17MCOM0009
SUBMITTED TO:
 PROF.QAIS ASLAM

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman 980pp, Secker and
Warburg. In 2002 I took part in a Norwegian book club pool of 100 authors from all over the
world to find the “best and most central works in world literature”. Don Quixote was first of the
selected 100 books, with 50 % more votes than any other book. Was the novel selected because
the writers felt a primitive love and attachment to the story and characters, or were they making a
historical judgement about its importance as the first real novel?

The British television director, Mike Dibb, made a wonderful documentary in 1995 about
the pervasive presence of the Don in modern life, from kitsch to high culture, from kitchen tiles
to Picasso. Readers review on Amazon of previous translations include accounts of transforming
reading experiences and tributes to the life and warmth of the tale. There are also cavils and
grumbles about narrowness and repetitions. Edith Grossman’s new and fluent translation gives
us another chance to think about the book’s persisting life.

But writers both before and after modernism have been excited by the way Don Quixote
mediates between many ways of storytelling. The comic realist tale is played against the high
chivalric vision and mediaeval romantic forms and feelings. The novel includes interested
sentimental novellas, and develops a peculiar self-consciousness in the second part, as Quixote
and Panza bump into people who know them intimately because they have read the first part.

In the second part there are several characters who are several characters who are bent on
having 17th-century fun by staging romantic episodes for Quixote to take part in, to amuse
themselves-lovelorn maidens, false knights, fake enchantments. “deciders were as mad as the
deceived and that the duke and duchess came very close to seeming like fools, since they went to
such lengths to deceive two fools”.

The interplay between this unreality and the imaginary reality of the world Quixote
travels through depends on the rendering of the solidity of master and servant. The mind beside
the Knight at arms. The mind wanders freely, the body gets battered. Until panza finds a way to
disenchant dulcinea by lashing saplings in the dark. Nabokov, famously, came to hate the novel
because of the cruelty of the worlds in which it was set. Indeed, a modern reader reacts
differently to japes and humiliations.

Sancho Panza combines an understanding of the riddle about reality and unreality with an
understanding about those wandering pairs in western literature. All of them are aspects of an
internal dialogue inside one man: idealism against skepticism, honor against expediency, this
world against a hypothetical other world, heaven or the golden age. Another use of Cervantes
archetypes to make a subtle definition of the uses of art.