The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 01
Translated by John Ormsby
A lonely old man in a dusty Spanish province reads himself into madness and rides out to battle giants. This is the audacious premise that birthed the modern novel, and it has lost none of its power to delight and disturb. Cervantes, writing in prison, created in Don Quixote a figure both ridiculous and noble, a man whose refusal to accept the world as it is makes him both a laughingstock and a kind of hero. Accompanied by his sturdy squire Sancho Panza, the knight-errant stumbles through misadventures where windmills become dragons and inns become castles, each encounter revealing something essential about how we construct meaning from chaos. The comedy is sharp, but beneath it lies a profound meditation on the nature of reality, the tyranny of social convention, and the stubborn persistence of ideals in a world that has outgrown them. Four centuries later, Don Quixote remains startlingly alive, the book we return to when we ask whether it's better to be deluded by beauty or clear-eyed and hollow.
