About the Book
''A more profound and powerful work than this is not to be met with…[It is] the final and greatest utterance of the human mind."
[Don Quixote is] the first and best of all novels, which nevertheless is more than a novel.
— Harold Bloom
When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches its reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Don Quixote is better than any single creation in Homer, Tolstoy or Shakespeare ... This heraldic creature ... This tattered, battered, divine old dreaming fool.
I read Don Quixote just before starting Gangs of New York and discovered that everything you might want to do with style, Cervantes did first: time shifts, answering critics of the first volume in the second, all the new-wave tricks. It's both terribly funny and maddening, because by the end you don't really know where the point of view is really coming from, who Don Quixote is, or if he really believed in what he was doing.
