Don quixote

»        Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being,» said novelist Milan Kundera. «And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?»
n—-Widely regarded as the world’s first
nmodern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. This Modern Library edition presents the acclaimed Samuel Putnam translation of the epic tale, complete with notes, variant readings, and an Introduction by the translator.
n—-The debt owed to Cervantes by literature is immense. From Milan Kundera: «Cervan-
ntes is the founder of the Modern Era. . . . The novelist need answer to no one but
nCervantes.» Lionel Trilling observed: «It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.» Vladmir Nabo-kov wrote: «Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality. . . . He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.» And V. S. Pritchett observed: «Don Quixote begins as a province, turns into Spain, and ends as a universe. . . . The true spell of Cervantes is that he is a natural magician in pure story-telling.»