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I read the book Don Quixote, or the original title, “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”, as translated to English by Charles Jarvis in 1742. This book was originally written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, on or about 1605 and 1615, in two parts. The book was written as a novel and a satire, and has been referred to as, “the first modern novel” by one of its English translators, Harold Bloom. The novel is referred to in works such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. Miguel wrote the book many years after The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written at the end of the 14th Century), and he seems to have taken some inspiration from it, as he does tell some tales using the characters in it much like Chaucer did. I feel it is worth mentioning that this novel is enormous, with 52 chapters in the first part, and 74 chapters in the last.

Cervantes writes the novel as if it portrayed an actual person on their travels, as a history. The protagonist is an elderly Spanish scholar, Alonso Quixano, who has read enough books of chivalry that he has gone mad. He decides to become a knight, and sets out to adventure around the countryside, much like those knights in the tales of King Arthur. The humor found in the book is that the man is far from a knight, being an elderly scholar. The adventures are when he meets people or objects, and how he interprets them as if he were in a fantastic environment, and how he reacts to them, as well as how they react to him. Quixote as a person is discussed by the narrator (the author) and he often states that the novel is historic fact and not fiction, a theme that started before the story, in the author’s preface.

Don ...

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..., dies from a fever, and the story ends. Where so much of the novel is spent telling his story, and the reader will become attached to Don Quixote, an ending like this shifts from the theme of good humor to a very real, very serious tone. If I could change it, however, I’m not sure I necessarily would. It seems to fit the structure to some romanticized tales of chivalry, in that while the hero dies, he left his mark on all those he met, and he did good to the world.

This novel is enormous. With 126(!) chapters, and because the novel was originally published as two separate books, I feel it should normally be read or assigned that way. I have listened to parts of a free Audio Book of Don Quixote translated by Edith Grossman; the audiobook has an excellent narrator but is very slow compared to reading the novel. The audiobook itself comes to a length of 39 hours!