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Feb 17, 2016rpavlacic rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
It's often been said that Don Quixote may be the greatest fictional story ever told, and after reading it for myself I would certainly have to agree. One can never be sure if the protagonist is ingenious, insane or just plain delusional, but it is from he that we get the expression "tilting at windmills" - fighting antagonists and enemies (human or otherwise) that do not exist. The deuterotagonist of Sancho Panza is at times Quixote's most loyal sidekick and at others his greatest critic. The genius of Cervantes is evident more than four centuries after he first wrote his words. The book was actually written in two parts about ten years apart; the second part of the novel was drafted when a "fake" Quixote was published by a rival, and there are frequent references to this alleged author and the false version of the story as well, "setting the record straight" as it were in the second part. Don Quixote is not an easy story to translate into English. But this particular version by Edith Grossman may be the most faithful translation that exists in the marketplace. It's not too scholarly but she doesn't use simplistic words either - where a longer and more accurate word is appropriate, that is what she uses. There are quite a few footnotes from Ms Grossman to explain the context of quotations, Latin phrases, and double entendres, as well as those places where the second person plural is used to address an individual either formally or in condescension - something that exists in Latinate languages but is lacking in English. If you think you'll read this book in a couple of days, you're dreaming. Try two to three weeks. But you'll be entertained as you rarely have, and gain a window into life in Spain in the days of the Inquisition and when stories of knights errant - the would be successors to the Knights of the Round Table - were all the rage.