Book review: analysing Don Quixote, the dynamo at the heart of Spanish culture
In the four centuries since it was published, Cervantes' novel has become a timeless classic of world literature, speaking afresh to each new generation
Not only does Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote tower over Spanish literature like a giant windmill, it also can be seen as a turbine that powers Spanish culture. But the novel’s kinetic energy extends beyond the Iberian peninsula. As scholar Ilan Stavans catalogues in this engaging cultural history, Don Q and Sancho Panza have a powerful, ongoing influence on Latin American and US literature and culture as well. Except for the Bible, no book has been translated into English more often, Stavans declares, listing 20 different English translations between 1612 and 2009.
Stavans, a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, walks around the novel as if it were one of the famed sculptures of Don Q in a Spanish plaza, finding something notable or surprising to discuss from every angle.
With its digressions and interpolated tales, the baggy Don Quixote is far from an example of what Flaubert called le mot juste – though, Stavans points out, the author of Madame Bovary adored El Quijote (the Spanish honorific that pays homage to the novel’s primacy).
Don Quixote’s stature as the first modern novel comes from its consuming interest in fantasy (or idealism, or madness) versus reality, its bookishness (too much reading, after all, launched the knight-errant on his errant career), and its playful self-referentiality (such as the scene in which the barber and the priest, deciding which books from Alonso Quijano’s library to burn, consider the merits of an author named Cervantes).