In a village in La Mancha whose name
I cannot recall, there lived
long ago a country gentleman …
Thus begins Don Quixote, arguably the greatest single work of literature in human history. No book—with the exception of the Bible—is more widely read or often translated than the masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes. In 2002, the book which is widely acclaimed as the world’s first modern novel was voted the greatest work of fiction of all time in a poll by the Norwegian Nobel Institute. The judges included 100 eminent writers from 54 countries, among them Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Milan Kundera, Carlos Fuentes and Nadine Gordimer. Don Quixote polled 50 per cent more votes than any other book, including the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Cervantes’ contemporary, Shakespeare.
No less an authority than Vladimir Nabokov summed up the legacy of the errant knight in the following terms, ‘He looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through his sheer vitality … He stands for everything’.
William Faulkner undertook the monumental task of rereading the novel every year. The former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez is said to read a little of it every day. It acted as the muse for painters as diverse as Goya, Picasso and Dali.
This year, some 400 years after the first part of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha was first published in 1605, Cervantes’ picaresque tale is once again enjoying a revival, thanks in part to the 400th anniversary celebrations taking place in Spain.
Seemingly every bookshop across Spain is in danger of being overwhelmed by new editions of the work. Tourism in Castilla La Mancha—Spain’s central plateau and the home of Don Quixote—is booming, with visitors seeking windmills at which to tilt. And the appearance on Spanish television of the fantasy lifestyles of Spanish celebrities is frequently interspersed with more contemplative readings of Don Quixote, the ultimate and most lovable fantasist of all.
The secret to Don Quixote’s enduring appeal—it is at once popular with a mass readership yet has endured through the centuries as a seminal work in the canon of world literature—lies in Cervantes’ rare gift of blending in one character so many brilliant and earthy eccentricities with equally plentiful and elegant pearls of wisdom.
At times the story’s hero lectures his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza, with words of universal application:
Do