Don Quixote

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  • Author: Miguel De Cervantes
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Catalogue: 135367
  • Size: 14x22cm
Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.

The book is simultaneously a work whose authentic subject is literature and a chronicle of a hard, sordid actuality, the declining Spain of 1605-15. Confronting the conventions of Spanish society at his time some four hundred years ago, Miguel De Cervantes wittily and funnily exposes the follies of the time through the adventures, stories and misfortunes of these knight and servant.

"The Spanish Bible", as Miguel de Unamuno called it, Don Quixote is Cervantes's subtle critique of a realm that had given him only harsh measures in return for his own patriotic heroism. His magnificent knight's quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, making it the greatest of all narratives.

This new edition claims to present the definite translation. Edith Grossman's quality of diction and extraordinary prose marvellously highlights the spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline. Also worth mentioning is the wonderful illustration by Pablo Picasso on the front cover.

"Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. [...] His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer." - Miguel De Cervantes