Preparing for the 2019 Chapter-a-Day Read-along: Don Quixote

Why read Don Quixote? It remains the best as well as the first of all the novels…There are parts of  yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
– Harold Bloom

This is it, the grand novel of them all, the novel above all other novels: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Many of my friends think that my favorite novel is either Lord of the Rings or Les Misérables, and while I love Tolkien’s trilogy and Hugo’s magnum opus, my absolute favorite novel is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. I love the humor and the adventures, but most of all I just love Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. They are old friends of mine, and I sincerely hope they become your friends, too, as you read their story. But don’t just take my word for how great Don Quixote is. Daniel S. Burt places Don Quixote at number one in his book The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. It is the highest ranked novel on my summary of great books lists, appearing on 12 of 13 lists. Lord Macaulay calls it “certainly the best novel in the world, beyond all comparison.” And of the 100 books chosen for the Bokklubben World Library, all were placed on “equal footing” except for Don Quixote, which was given the honor of being called “the greatest literary work ever written.”

This is the novel that launches the 2019 Chapter-a-Day Read-along. By May 8, you will be able to say that you have read the greatest novel ever written.

On one level, Don Quixote is the story one man’s quest to revive chivalry and serve his country as a knight-errant. But not only is it a grand adventure, it also features perhaps the greatest of all fictional friendships in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

What to Know Before Beginning to Read Don Quixote

The first thing to know is that Don Quixote is comprised of two parts, each written ten years apart. Part 1 is the shorter of the two, at 52 chapters, and as Clifton Fadiman puts it, “do not be put off by an occasional tedious passage in Part 1. Persist to Part 2. It is by far the greater. Even the finest writers have to educate themselves through the medium of their own creation…From writing about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza [Cervantes] learned how great they really were.” Part 2 consists of 74 chapters and contains fewer digressions.

Speaking of digressions, Don Quixote has its share. However, these are different than the digressions in Les Misérables. Hugo’s digressions were often essays, historical accounts, or social commentary. The digressions in Don Quixote are more like stories within the main story. These sometimes last for several chapters, so be patient with them and try to enjoy them on their own merit. Remember that Don Quixote is really the first novel in Western literature, so Cervantes is beginning to work the kinks out of the genre, so to speak.

Which Edition Should I Read?

Since I don’t read Spanish, I will be reading Don Quixote in translation. I really like the Edith Grossman translation and would recommend that above others, but I also think the translations Tom Lathrop and Burton Raffel are worth looking at. Whichever edition you get, be careful that it’s unabridged version and contains both parts 1 and 2.

How to Read Don Quixote by Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom devotes an entire chapter to Don Quixote in his book How to Read and Why, including these insightful comments:

Any discussion of how to read novels and why must include the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the first and best of all novels, which nevertheless is more than a novel.

Novelists who have loved Don Quixote include Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne in eighteenth century England; none of their work is conceivable without Cervantes. The influence of Cervantes is intense upon Stendhal and Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary is “the female Quixote.” Herman Melville and Mark Twain are Cervantine, and so are Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Thomas Mann, and virtually all modern Hispanic writers of fiction.

Though very nearly everything that can happen does happen in Don Quixote, what matter most are the ongoing conversations between Sancho and the Don. Open the book at random, and you are likely to find yourself in the midst of one of their exchanges, angry or whimsical, but ultimately always loving, and founded on mutual respect. Even when they argue most fiercely, their courtesy is unfailing, and they never stop learning from listening to the other. And by hearing, they change.

Final Thoughts

Before leaving you with a few more choice quotes about Don Quixote, remember that we will begin with the Prologue to Part 1 on January 1 (along with the prefatory poems) and continue with Chapter 1 on January 2. You can download the detailed 2019 read-along schedule in pdf format to track your progress more easily. With that, I look forward to reading this groundbreaking story with you one chapter at a time.

Additional Comments on Don Quixote

From Clifton Fadiman in The New Lifetime Reading Plan:

There are really only a few literary characters we think of as permanently alive. Hamlet is one, Don Quixote surely another.

Don Quixote, once you allow for its leisurely tempo, is one of the best adventure stories ever written….That is what makes it a classic for the young. When you reread it years later you perceive that it is also a great adventure story of the mind, for some of its most exciting events occur during the conversations between the knight and his loquacious squire, two of the best talkers who ever used their vocal cords creatively.

Don Quixote is a supremely humorous novel. A familiar anecdote tells us that when King Phillip III of Spain noticed a man reading beside the road and laughing so much that the tears were rolling down his cheeks, he said, “That man is either crazy or he is reading Don Quixote.” Some readers laugh aloud, others grin, some smile externally, others internally. And some read it with a curious emotion mingling delight and sorrow.

From Charles Van Doren in The Joy of Reading:

…to find real adventures in this workaday world is the signal achievement of a noble and great spirit. Such is Don Quixote. There has never been anyone else like him. Nor has there been such a pair as those two, the old knight on his tall, skinny horse, and the short squire on his fat donkey. They wend their way, forever, in our imaginations. I wish we could call them back.

From Gustave Flaubert in Letters, November 22, 1852 (as quoted in Daniel S. Burt, The Novel 100)

What is prodigious about Don Quixote is the absence of art, and that perpetual infusion of illusion and reality which makes the book so comic and so poetic. All others are such dwarfs beside it. How small one feels, oh Lord, how small one feels!

From Harold Bloom in Novelists and Novels

The reader needs no better company than Sancho and the Don: to make a third with them is to be blessed with happiness, yet also to be favored with self-insight. The Don and Sancho, between them, know all that there is to know. They know at last exactly who they are, which is what, finally, they will teach the rest of us.