[.ca] Don Quixote de La Mancha (ISBN 0679602860)

DON'T FOOL YOURSELF:
DON QUIXOTE is a masterpiece and Smollet's translation is also a masterpiece--the best possible, as it reads like an original. Want DQ in modern English? Don't fool yourself--you'll never get the same feeling--DQ is even difficult for Spanish-speakers to read! The raves on the back cover are not misleads.

Greatest book ever written:
If you could have one book on a desert island this would be it.

a one trick pony:
this is a pretty funny book about an errant-knight and his many misadventures. only problem is, there's really only one joke in this massive (1000+ page) book, namely, what a fool and madman this gallant knight is. after a while, the joke begins to wear thin. i don't think this is the greatest novel ever written. it's too poorly stuctured and one-dimensional for that grand distinction. i think the reason this book IS so famous is because of the character of don quixote himself. the image of the mad don charging giant windmills is one of the most colorful and memorable in all fiction. don quixote is one of the few examples of a character who transcends the book that created him. hamlet and falstaff are two other examples. a good read, but doesn't live up to the hype.

Recommended to anyone who wants to read it:
Did Cervantes write Don Quixote only for those in the early twenty first century with degrees in comparative Spanish literature? NO! This book is recommended to anyone interested in literature. This is not to say that it should not be read seriously and with close attention. Not everyone has the time or money to spend on degrees in Spanish literature

A tale of insanity at it's finest.:
Don Quixote is a classic piece of literature. If someone could produce a more up to date, vernacular translation, it would rival any comedy made today. This is a story about one man caught up in so many chivalry books that he becomes insane and starts traveling through Spain acting as a heroic knight while fighting made up villains and monsters. By his side is his gullible yet loyal servant Sancho. It's nice to know that during the Renaissance period such humor existed. The first part of the book deals with him traveling throughout and mixing up inns for castles, random people as kings or knights, and a random woman as his unrequited love for which all of the world must know. It's a tragic comedy where one man's insanity and futility provide worry for a few, concern for others, and great entertainment for most of the characters. What's interesting is the "twist" in the middle that leads to the second part, where after one man wrote a book about Don Quixote's wild adventures, a rich family, upon seeing the actual man who was in the book, decide to play along in probably the cruelest hoax in history. Claiming there Duke and Duchess, and promising the most absurd things. One of which was giving Sancho an actual province to rule over. The one thing that irked me about this book was that even though it needs to be translated for English readers, no translator has yet made the book as fluid or readable as it deserves to be. All in all, it's a good book, but hopefully a general author, and not some stuffy scholar, could translate it what it should be - a really funny and tragic story.