Classic Books Store
Don Quixote
RRP: $29.95
Our Price: $19.77
You Save: $ 10.18 ( 34% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Ecco
Author: Miguel de Cervantes, Harold Bloom
Publisher: Ecco
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $19.77
You Save: $ 10.18 ( 34% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Ecco
Author: Miguel de Cervantes, Harold Bloom
Publisher: Ecco
Average Customer Rating:
Experimental feature: Order Don Quixote from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.
Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.
Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.
Don Quixote Description
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.3
EAN: 9780060188702
ISBN: 0060188707
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 976
Publication Date: 2003-11-01
Publisher: Ecco
Product Release Date: 2003-10-21
Studio: Ecco
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.3
EAN: 9780060188702
ISBN: 0060188707
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 976
Publication Date: 2003-11-01
Publisher: Ecco
Product Release Date: 2003-10-21
Studio: Ecco
Editorial Review of Don Quixote
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
"Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman's translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction.Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake."
From the Introduction by Harold Bloom
Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.
Customer Reviews of Don Quixote
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: So boring and old
Review: This book was very boring and old. We had to reed this book in class and every one said that this book was to boring. Every one cant be wrong! I mean the actshion seens was so bad that I was crying! I will never reed a book by this auther agan. The mane caracter was very boring and all he did was go around on a hors and act stupid. This book was so bad that I was crying! May be I dont reed a lot but I know what is good and what is worthles. This book has very litle substants. Think twice before reeding this stupid book and reed some thing newer and more inportent insted.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: peerless.
Review: This is, in my opinion, the best book ever written. I am not a huge fiction fan, so I was surprised at the brilliance of this classic. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza make for two of the best characters in fictional history. The writing is so overblown and exaggerated that you cannot help but laugh. Each page carries humour to a new height, untill you realize that the book is philosophically profound.
The story line is pretty simple: regular dude gets the idea that he is a famous knight errant and begins a chivalrous quest to impress his lady and win her love (Lady Dulcinea of El Toboso- who, unfortunately, is actually nothing more than an ugly peasant woman). From such simple fabric is this beautifully textured quilt woven! There is much more in this book than the delusional Quixote mistaking windmills for giants. There is much more than simply poking at chivalry and decrying the decline of a peculiar weigh of life. What we have is the proverbial dreamer, locked up in a world of his own hopes, fantasies, and ideas. In this world, however crazy, Quixote is free to live, hope, and escape from the mundane. He lives his unreal life to the fullest. Ironically, it is when he realizes his life has been a sham when he dies.
The moral here seems obvious: We all need a dream and, if we lose that dream, we might just as well be dead. This is the only way to escape existential angst. This theme is universal. From myth to pop-culture, the idea of the heroic quest has attracted millions. With good reason.
Have you ever met the bland zombie-people who live hoplessly in the here and now? These creatures are some of the most depressing, hopeless slabs of meat anyone could lay eyes upon.
Don Quixote would be an average book if it simply reminded us of the importance of having passion. It does much more: It reminds us to pursue this passion- this white whale- with humour, humility, and self-deprecation. After all, we are all chasing windmills. We might just as well stop to laugh along the way.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not long enough
Review: Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
Until now, I've only read Don Quixote in small doses, reading his battle with the windmills or his mistaking a barber's washbin for the Helmet of Mambrino out of context, either for class or in anthologies. After reading the first book in sequence, I'm ashamed of myself. Grossman's translation certainly adds some accessibility for the the American sensibility, but what struck me most was Cervantes' ironic self-awareness and societal critique, and his playfulness with the novel form that wasn't even technically a form yet. Quixote, whose heroes exist only in his mind at the novel's beginning, eventually meets and argues hilariously with some of them as well as plenty of third parties that stand in disbelief at his lunacy.
It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book review of this book without writing a book myself, so I think I'll just comment randomly:
I laughed and thought hardest when Cervantes brought in the ladies, both real and imagined, to continually check Quixote's romanticization of the female persuasion. His lady Dulcinea of Toboso seems to be a man-like wheat-shocker, but you'd never know it from his visions of her angelic graces. But Quixote seems to be just a worst-case scenario of all the male impulses the other characters display; pretty much all the men objectify women to superhuman levels, and many of the women are either affronted or jilted by the men's fickle imaginations.
I've heard the second book is quite a bit darker and even more self-referential as Quixote waited 10 years between books, and I have agree. Especially in the second book, I wasn't sure what to think of the "royalty" DQ and Poncho ran into along their merry way. Either the irony was too subtle for my radar, or Cervantes seemed to be in on the arrogant, mean-spirited, sadistic jokes the landed gentry played on the deluded duo. Some of the jokes (the flying horse, for example) were laugh-out-loud funny, but some were just, well, wrong (Altisodora's feigned love for Quixote, practically starving Sancho after giving him his insula governorship). And then some, like the 3000 lashes Sancho had to give his own sweaty buttocks to make Dulcinea pretty again, were both, but mainly because of Sancho's ingenious ways of avoiding delivering the lashes.
The ending really sucked. The episodic nature of the novel I guess prevents any climactic closure, but without giving anything away, Cervantes ends the novel so apologetically that he seems to go ideologically against every previous chapter. I would have stopped reading with ten pages to go if it hadn't been such a long trip to the end.
To my pleasure, the novel was much more violent overall than I expected. If you took out and strung together all the lumps, cuts, bruises, tramplings, beatings, and lashes Quixote and Sancho took it would rival The Passion of the Christ. And be a hundred times more enjoyable.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Don Quixote is my Spanish Bible.
Review: "Time ripens all things. No man is born wise."
Don Quixote is one of my ten favorite novels, and I confess I read it as my Spanish Bible. Miguel de Cervantes's novel follows a disconnected series adventures of the self-proclaimed "Don Quixote de la Mancha," a fifty-year-old country gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who has an obsession for reading books. Eventually, because he has lost so much sleep reading books, he deludes himself into believing he is a knight errant. He puts on an old suit of armor, mounts his skinny horse Rocinante, and then sets out with his dull-witted neighbour, Sancho Panza, "for there were evils to undo, wrongs to right, injustices to correct, abuses to ameliorate, and offenses to rectify" (p. 24). Don Quixote's muse and courtly love interest is Dulcinea del Toboso (a neighbouring peasant girl, Aldonza Lorenzo), who is totally oblivious of Quixote's feelings for her. She never actually appears in the novel. Soon we find Quixote attacking windmills, believing they are giants. On his Quixotic quest, he repeatedly becomes the butt of outrageously cruel practical jokes, all because of his self-deception. Even his humble squire Sancho is forced to play along with Quixote's delusions. Although Quixote's quest for adventure leads him to complete disillusionment, melancholia, and to the renunciation of chivalry, ultimately (as Harold Bloom suggests in his excellent Introduction) Cervantes' novel may be read as a lesson in Quixotism (note the capital Q), the act of being caught up in idealism or in the romance of noble deeds, and the pursuit of unreachable goals (fighting with the Windmills of one's own Head).
Dostoyevsky called Don Quixote "the ultimate and most sublime work of human thinking." There are many translations of Don Quixote (at least twenty in English), the two most recent by John Rutherford and by Edith Grossman. While I am not qualified to say Grossman's is the definitive edition of Don Quixote, there are several reasons to read her translation. First, she is an award-winning translator respected for her previous translations of Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude;Love in the Time of Cholera). "Fidelity is surely our highest aim," she has said about the art of translation; "but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation." Her translation of Don Quixote has been praised by such writers and as Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom, and is quite readable. Second, Grossman's translation includes an insightful introduction by Bloom, making this a highly-recommended edition, if not a definitive edition of Don Quixote.
G. Merritt
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Such a Beautiful Book
Review: This is the book to answer to all books. It is the book that makes all other books question their bookness. It is the essence of book.
No, but really.. I feel like Don Quixote was a real turning point in my life as a reader. It changed me from a person who loved books into a Reader, and by Reader I mean a person who reads as an artform, like a painter paints or a musician plays. Can a person read creatively? Can they actively express themselves through the act of reading? Yes.
Review Summary: So boring and old
Review: This book was very boring and old. We had to reed this book in class and every one said that this book was to boring. Every one cant be wrong! I mean the actshion seens was so bad that I was crying! I will never reed a book by this auther agan. The mane caracter was very boring and all he did was go around on a hors and act stupid. This book was so bad that I was crying! May be I dont reed a lot but I know what is good and what is worthles. This book has very litle substants. Think twice before reeding this stupid book and reed some thing newer and more inportent insted.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: peerless.
Review: This is, in my opinion, the best book ever written. I am not a huge fiction fan, so I was surprised at the brilliance of this classic. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza make for two of the best characters in fictional history. The writing is so overblown and exaggerated that you cannot help but laugh. Each page carries humour to a new height, untill you realize that the book is philosophically profound.
The story line is pretty simple: regular dude gets the idea that he is a famous knight errant and begins a chivalrous quest to impress his lady and win her love (Lady Dulcinea of El Toboso- who, unfortunately, is actually nothing more than an ugly peasant woman). From such simple fabric is this beautifully textured quilt woven! There is much more in this book than the delusional Quixote mistaking windmills for giants. There is much more than simply poking at chivalry and decrying the decline of a peculiar weigh of life. What we have is the proverbial dreamer, locked up in a world of his own hopes, fantasies, and ideas. In this world, however crazy, Quixote is free to live, hope, and escape from the mundane. He lives his unreal life to the fullest. Ironically, it is when he realizes his life has been a sham when he dies.
The moral here seems obvious: We all need a dream and, if we lose that dream, we might just as well be dead. This is the only way to escape existential angst. This theme is universal. From myth to pop-culture, the idea of the heroic quest has attracted millions. With good reason.
Have you ever met the bland zombie-people who live hoplessly in the here and now? These creatures are some of the most depressing, hopeless slabs of meat anyone could lay eyes upon.
Don Quixote would be an average book if it simply reminded us of the importance of having passion. It does much more: It reminds us to pursue this passion- this white whale- with humour, humility, and self-deprecation. After all, we are all chasing windmills. We might just as well stop to laugh along the way.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not long enough
Review: Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
Until now, I've only read Don Quixote in small doses, reading his battle with the windmills or his mistaking a barber's washbin for the Helmet of Mambrino out of context, either for class or in anthologies. After reading the first book in sequence, I'm ashamed of myself. Grossman's translation certainly adds some accessibility for the the American sensibility, but what struck me most was Cervantes' ironic self-awareness and societal critique, and his playfulness with the novel form that wasn't even technically a form yet. Quixote, whose heroes exist only in his mind at the novel's beginning, eventually meets and argues hilariously with some of them as well as plenty of third parties that stand in disbelief at his lunacy.
It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book review of this book without writing a book myself, so I think I'll just comment randomly:
I laughed and thought hardest when Cervantes brought in the ladies, both real and imagined, to continually check Quixote's romanticization of the female persuasion. His lady Dulcinea of Toboso seems to be a man-like wheat-shocker, but you'd never know it from his visions of her angelic graces. But Quixote seems to be just a worst-case scenario of all the male impulses the other characters display; pretty much all the men objectify women to superhuman levels, and many of the women are either affronted or jilted by the men's fickle imaginations.
I've heard the second book is quite a bit darker and even more self-referential as Quixote waited 10 years between books, and I have agree. Especially in the second book, I wasn't sure what to think of the "royalty" DQ and Poncho ran into along their merry way. Either the irony was too subtle for my radar, or Cervantes seemed to be in on the arrogant, mean-spirited, sadistic jokes the landed gentry played on the deluded duo. Some of the jokes (the flying horse, for example) were laugh-out-loud funny, but some were just, well, wrong (Altisodora's feigned love for Quixote, practically starving Sancho after giving him his insula governorship). And then some, like the 3000 lashes Sancho had to give his own sweaty buttocks to make Dulcinea pretty again, were both, but mainly because of Sancho's ingenious ways of avoiding delivering the lashes.
The ending really sucked. The episodic nature of the novel I guess prevents any climactic closure, but without giving anything away, Cervantes ends the novel so apologetically that he seems to go ideologically against every previous chapter. I would have stopped reading with ten pages to go if it hadn't been such a long trip to the end.
To my pleasure, the novel was much more violent overall than I expected. If you took out and strung together all the lumps, cuts, bruises, tramplings, beatings, and lashes Quixote and Sancho took it would rival The Passion of the Christ. And be a hundred times more enjoyable.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Don Quixote is my Spanish Bible.
Review: "Time ripens all things. No man is born wise."
Don Quixote is one of my ten favorite novels, and I confess I read it as my Spanish Bible. Miguel de Cervantes's novel follows a disconnected series adventures of the self-proclaimed "Don Quixote de la Mancha," a fifty-year-old country gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who has an obsession for reading books. Eventually, because he has lost so much sleep reading books, he deludes himself into believing he is a knight errant. He puts on an old suit of armor, mounts his skinny horse Rocinante, and then sets out with his dull-witted neighbour, Sancho Panza, "for there were evils to undo, wrongs to right, injustices to correct, abuses to ameliorate, and offenses to rectify" (p. 24). Don Quixote's muse and courtly love interest is Dulcinea del Toboso (a neighbouring peasant girl, Aldonza Lorenzo), who is totally oblivious of Quixote's feelings for her. She never actually appears in the novel. Soon we find Quixote attacking windmills, believing they are giants. On his Quixotic quest, he repeatedly becomes the butt of outrageously cruel practical jokes, all because of his self-deception. Even his humble squire Sancho is forced to play along with Quixote's delusions. Although Quixote's quest for adventure leads him to complete disillusionment, melancholia, and to the renunciation of chivalry, ultimately (as Harold Bloom suggests in his excellent Introduction) Cervantes' novel may be read as a lesson in Quixotism (note the capital Q), the act of being caught up in idealism or in the romance of noble deeds, and the pursuit of unreachable goals (fighting with the Windmills of one's own Head).
Dostoyevsky called Don Quixote "the ultimate and most sublime work of human thinking." There are many translations of Don Quixote (at least twenty in English), the two most recent by John Rutherford and by Edith Grossman. While I am not qualified to say Grossman's is the definitive edition of Don Quixote, there are several reasons to read her translation. First, she is an award-winning translator respected for her previous translations of Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude;Love in the Time of Cholera). "Fidelity is surely our highest aim," she has said about the art of translation; "but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation." Her translation of Don Quixote has been praised by such writers and as Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom, and is quite readable. Second, Grossman's translation includes an insightful introduction by Bloom, making this a highly-recommended edition, if not a definitive edition of Don Quixote.
G. Merritt
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Such a Beautiful Book
Review: This is the book to answer to all books. It is the book that makes all other books question their bookness. It is the essence of book.
No, but really.. I feel like Don Quixote was a real turning point in my life as a reader. It changed me from a person who loved books into a Reader, and by Reader I mean a person who reads as an artform, like a painter paints or a musician plays. Can a person read creatively? Can they actively express themselves through the act of reading? Yes.