Is Don Quixote Best Book Ever Written
Don Quixote is the world’s best book say the world’s top authors.
Don Quixote, the tale of a Spanish knight driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, was yesterday voted the best book of all time in a survey of around 100 of the world’s best authors.
“If there is one novel you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote,” the Nigerian author Ben Okri said at the Norwegian Nobel Institute as he announced the results of history’s most expansive authors’ poll. “Don Quixote has the most wonderful and elaborated story, yet it is simple.”
Around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the “most meaningful book of all time” in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo.
Voters included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Seamus Heaney, Carlos Fuentes and Norman Mailer. Isabel Allende boycotted the exercise on the grounds that she objected to “book surveys”.
The Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren managed to vote just before her death in January, and her book Pippi Longstocking made the list.
Lessing said the authors aimed to spark a thirst for reading in a young generation that preferred TV and Playstations. “They should be called educated barbarians,” she said.
Miguel de Cervantes’ tale of misguided heroism gained 50% more votes than any other book, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer and Tolstoy.
Ten authors got more than one book on to the list, which was not ranked. After Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky emerged as the most worthwhile read with four books listed: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.
The only Shakespeare plays the authors agreed on were Hamlet, King Lear and Othello.
The Bard was matched by Franz Kafka, who was virtually unknown during his lifetime. His three angst-ridden tales of grotesque alienation on the list were The Trial, The Castle and the Complete Stories.
Three works by Leo Tolstoy made it: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
The American William Faulkner and the Briton Virginia Woolf both scored twice, along with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who declined to vote.
Living writers were few and far between . Notable examples were Doris Lessing - whose Golden Notebook featured - and Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison.
Alf van der Hagen, an editor with the Norwegian Book Clubs, said: “The unique element to this list is that we didn’t just ask authors from Europe or the US, we took a worldwide survey for the first time.”
He said more than two-thirds of the 100 titles were written by Europeans, almost half were written last century and 11 were by women.
Don Quixote
Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote originally conceived as a comic satire against the chivalric romances. However, Cervantes did not destroy the chivalric ideal of the romances he rejected - he transfigured it. The work have been seen as a veiled attack on the Catholic Church or on the contemporary Spanish politics, or symbolizing the duality of the Spanish character.
Neither wholly tragedy nor wholly comedy Don Quixote gives a panoramic view of the 17th-century Spanish society. Central characters are the elderly, idealistic knight, who sets out on his old horse Rosinante to seek adventure, and the materialistic squire Sancho Panza, who accompanies his master from failure to another. Their relationship, although they argue most fiercely, is ultimately founded upon mutual respect. In the debates they gradually take on some of each other’s attributes.
During his travels, Don Quixote’s overexcited imagination blinds him to reality: he thinks windmills to be giants, flocks of sheep to be armies, and galley-slaves to be oppressed gentlemen. Sancho is named governor of the isle of Barataria, a mock title, and Don Quixote is bested in a duel with the Knight of the White Moon, in reality a student of his acquaintance in disguise. Don Quixote is passionately devoted to his own imaginative creation, the beautiful Dulcinea. “Oh Dulcinea de Tobosa, day of my night, glory of my suffering, true North and compass of every path I take, guiding star of my fate…” The hero returns to La Mancha, and only at his deathbed Don Quixote confesses the folly of his past adventures.
Plot Overview
Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. After a first failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises to make Sancho the wealthy governor of an isle. On his horse, Rocinante, a barn nag well past his prime, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain in search of glory and grand adventure. He gives up food, shelter, and comfort, all in the name of a peasant woman, Dulcinea del Toboso, whom he envisions as a princess.
On his second expedition, Don Quixote becomes more of a bandit than a savior, stealing from and hurting baffled and justifiably angry citizens while acting out against what he perceives as threats to his knighthood or to the world. Don Quixote abandons a boy, leaving him in the hands of an evil farmer simply because the farmer swears an oath that he will not harm the boy. He steals a barber’s basin that he believes to be the mythic Mambrino’s helmet, and he becomes convinced of the healing powers of the Balsam of Fierbras, an elixir that makes him so ill that, by comparison, he later feels healed. Sancho stands by Don Quixote, often bearing the brunt of the punishments that arise from Don Quixote’s behavior.
The story of Don Quixote’s deeds includes the stories of those he meets on his journey. Don Quixote witnesses the funeral of a student who dies as a result of his love for a disdainful lady turned shepherdess. He frees a wicked and devious galley slave, Gines de Pasamonte, and unwittingly reunites two bereaved couples, Cardenio and Lucinda, and Ferdinand and Dorothea. Torn apart by Ferdinand’s treachery, the four lovers finally come together at an inn where Don Quixote sleeps, dreaming that he is battling a giant.
Along the way, the simple Sancho plays the straight man to Don Quixote, trying his best to correct his master’s outlandish fantasies. Two of Don Quixote’s friends, the priest and the barber, come to drag him home. Believing that he is under the force of an enchantment, he accompanies them, thus ending his second expedition and the First Part of the novel.
The Second Part of the novel begins with a passionate invective against a phony sequel of Don Quixote that was published in the interim between Cervantes’s two parts. Everywhere Don Quixote goes, his reputation—gleaned by others from both the real and the false versions of the story—precedes him.
As the two embark on their journey, Sancho lies to Don Quixote, telling him that an evil enchanter has transformed Dulcinea into a peasant girl. Undoing this enchantment, in which even Sancho comes to believe, becomes Don Quixote’s chief goal.
Don Quixote meets a Duke and Duchess who conspire to play tricks on him. They make a servant dress up as Merlin, for example, and tell Don Quixote that Dulcinea’s enchantment—which they know to be a hoax—can be undone only if Sancho whips himself 3,300 times on his naked backside. Under the watch of the Duke and Duchess, Don Quixote and Sancho undertake several adventures. They set out on a flying wooden horse, hoping to slay a giant who has turned a princess and her lover into metal figurines and bearded the princess’s female servants.
During his stay with the Duke, Sancho becomes governor of a fictitious isle. He rules for ten days until he is wounded in an onslaught the Duke and Duchess sponsor for their entertainment. Sancho reasons that it is better to be a happy laborer than a miserable governor.
A young maid at the Duchess’s home falls in love with Don Quixote, but he remains a staunch worshipper of Dulcinea. Their never-consummated affair amuses the court to no end. Finally, Don Quixote sets out again on his journey, but his demise comes quickly. Shortly after his arrival in Barcelona, the Knight of the White Moon—actually an old friend in disguise—vanquishes him.
Cervantes relates the story of Don Quixote as a history, which he claims he has translated from a manuscript written by a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes becomes a party to his own fiction, even allowing Sancho and Don Quixote to modify their own histories and comment negatively upon the false history published in their names.
In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote forswears all the chivalric truths he followed so fervently and dies from a fever. With his death, knights-errant become extinct. Benengeli returns at the end of the novel to tell us that illustrating the demise of chivalry was his main purpose in writing the history of Don Quixote.
4 Comments »
i love this book..
Comment by odessa zepeda — December 5, 2007 @ 19:59
I was much too, young when I read this to understand it.
I found the book in a trash pile when I was 4…and today I’m 4 and against.
And just as confused as this book was to me then, LOL.
Comment by freida — December 10, 2007 @ 23:14
The answer is simple: YES because is about a man with a noble heart who figths against the true human being. Is just perfect.
My Top 3 Writers of all time:
1. Cervantes
2. Shakespeare
3. García Márquez
Comment by Demetrio Moreno — December 28, 2007 @ 05:23
…reminds me of Clint Eastwood and “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”
For some reason, is there a correlation: “Of course, dear Freida…you know there is.”
Quote to myself, LOL.
Comment by freida — March 28, 2008 @ 13:42