The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 03
1605
The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 03
1605
Translated by John Ormsby
An aging gentleman loses his mind on books of chivalry and declares himself a knight-errant. So begins the most influential comic novel ever written. In this section, Don Quixote and his earthily skeptical squire Sancho Panza venture into the world, mistaking inns for castles, peasants for princesses, and windmills for giants. The windmill scene, perhaps the most famous in all of literature, captures something essential: a man so committed to his vision that reality itself must yield. Also included here is the brilliant episode of the curate and barber burning Quixote's library in an attempt to cure his madness, a scene that works as both hilarious literary criticism and a profound meditation on the power of books to shape (or warp) the human mind. Cervantes writes with a playful, meta-awareness that feels startlingly modern, and his portrait of a man whose beautiful delusions expose the lies of the respectable world around him has lost none of its power to disturb and delight.
