Don Quixote

[Mr Hyde]

Has anyone here read Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes?

If you have what did you think of the book?

[Etienne]

In a few words, it's one of the greatest masterpiece of literature, one of the foundations of the novel, a very funny and eternally modern book. It is also the kind of book that transcends interpretations, a book of great universality.

It is number two to no book, it belongs to this stratosphere of the sublime where no ranking is possible.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I think you like it then? Yes, I read this a long time ago and I surely need to read it again, a truly great work.

[stlukesguild]

What Etienne said...

[wilbur lim]

This is the initial literature book I had read.Stupendously,it is laudable,especially the ending of it.

[mona amon]

I've read it once, and think it's time to read it again. I loved it, in spite of the excess of fights and fisticuffs. At the rate at which Don Quixote and Sancho were getting beaten up I sometimes wondered how they were going to reach page 1050 in one piece! Strange how people in those days used to find violence funny. Well I suppose they still do, Tom and Jerry, WWE Wrestling, etc.

It's surprisingly easy to read for such a great, old, famous book! Rather difficult to describe because it's so full of different things (all the best books are). I don't know if the author intended a warning against reading too many romances of chivalry, but any reader will immediately identify with Don Quixote, and by 'reader' I don't mean one who reads a lot or even one who loves books, but one to whom the world of fiction presents a much more colourful and vivid reality than the actual, practical world- And so the reader goes about, head in the clouds, mounted on Rozinante, cutting a 'woeful figure' in the world of non-readers.

[whizzkid_9x]

This is a great book. I can't stop laughing. Cervantes was very successful in using contrast to describe the characteristic of Sancho and Don Quixote. Can't believe a man in the 17th century can write a 1000-page book without helps of any modern machines like today.
In the country I live in, they put a small part of Don Quixote in textbooks, u know, the part which Don Quixote fights with the windmills ? That is so interesting. His imaginary is so incredible and amazing.

[hfxKeiste]

In my opinion, I think that this was a pretty good book. We have read parts of it in Spanish and I'd like to finish reading the whole book but in English. One of my favorite parts was at the end when the one person ends an epitaph with the words "A crazy man his life he passed,/But in his senses died at last."

[Kotetsu1442]

I've read it once, and think it's time to read it again. I loved it, in spite of the excess of fights and fisticuffs.

In spite of the fights? I thought that that was an important part of the humor. The way Cervantes used silly and crude humor along with clever, subtle sub-textual jokes and run-on gags was what made the book all the more hilarious to me. Hardcore Quixote fans might find this almost sacrilegious, but I kinda think of that technique being the same that occasionally makes South Park very humorous in my book.

[mona amon]

Kotetsu1442, I'm the type who winces every time Wily E Coyote gets flattened by a road roller, and stares at the mindless violence of Tom and Jerry with incredulous horror, so I didn't find that stuff funny. But I think there was other sorts of humour which I've now forgotten.

[Kotetsu1442]

That's certainly a valid viewpoint. On its my own, I also find crude humor such as silly violence and toilet humor to be not at all entertaining. However, like in my previous example with South Park, it is not the crude humor itself that I find appealing. It is that, after designing complex and subtle sub-textual humor in a storyline, adding irony by employing crude humor (which is normally employed as a lack of real wit) I find more hilarious. I think it helps when a writer doesn't take his humor too seriously.

If you haven't re-read it like you said you intended too, then I agree that you should, it's definitely worth a re-read. If you find the crude toilet humor and violence to be un-entertaining, then spend more time focusing on the plot in general and what specific characters and scenes mean in terms of the comments that Cervantes is making on his society, because the way that he portrays some ideas to criticize them is often quite clever. While some of the things he criticizes might not be relevant to modern society they usually have parallels in our society that are just as much deserving of the same criticism, which is really why the book is considered to be as timeless as it is.