At fifty, Alonso Quijano has read himself into madness. He abandons his dusty estate in La Mancha to become Don Quixote de la Mancha, a knight-errant armed with rusted armor, a nag named Rocinante, and an unshakeable conviction that the world still needs heroes. His squire is Sancho Panza, a peasant whose earthy pragmatism collides endlessly with his master's soaring delusions. Together they tilt at windmills, free convicts who thank them with stones, and mistake taverns for castles. What begins as pure comedy darkens into something achingly human: a man so desperate to escape thegrayness of reality that he creates his own. Cervantes orchestrates this tragedy with a novelist's daring, folding stories within stories, mocking the romances he loves, and asking whether it is Quixote's madness that makes him free, or whether we are the fools for seeing only what is in front of us. Four centuries later, this remains the novel that invented everything modern fiction can do.
