Don Quixote
Penguin Classics
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Don Quixote
Narrated by:
Kayvan Novak, Josh Cohen, Alistair Petrie, Richard Hughes
Buy Now for £16.99
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Narrated by:
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Kayvan Novak
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Josh Cohen
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Alistair Petrie
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Richard Hughes
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by Kayvan Novak, Josh Cohen, Alistair Petrie, and Richard Hughes.
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote's fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.
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What a wonderful book
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It's not a book you need to wade straight through. A couple of chapters getting up in the morning, or going on a walk, or, if I wake up in the middle of the night, to put my demons to rest.
Balm for the soul
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An adventure that will accompany you for a lifetime
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Such is the work's coherence that one often forgets during this adventure that it is an episodic novel; most of the characters who appear in it are nonce characters who never appear again - and one very important character never actually appears in person at all! Cervantes appears to realise round about chapter 8 that he has stumbled upon a wonderful vehicle for exploring the human experience, and what may have started out as a short story resolves itself into first a novela, and then something utterly new, bold and exciting - the modern novel.
The alert reader enters on this journey with Cervantes and there are sublime moments of discovery as well as plenty of genuinely laugh-out-loud moments on the way. The development of character, in particular Sancho Panza (though that might merely be a personal preference), is impressive, but equally fascinating is the interplay of text and textuality - this is a novel that knows it's a novel and happily takes time to explore with the reader the boundaries of the form and the possibilities of the partnership the author forms with the reader.
There are few books about which one can say with confidence they will remain immortal. Don Quixote is one of them. I'm in the flush of having recently completed my reading of it (it took me about five weeks - mainly listening on my commute in the car), but I'm an experienced enough reader to know that this feeling of euphoria is not because of merely having ticked a book off my book list, but rather of having made the acquaintance of a cast of characters from the canon of world literature who will continue to give enjoyment for years to come.
There's a reason this is regarded as a Classic
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Along the way however the style of narration, surprisingly deft translation of its quite particular humour into modern English and gradual humanisation of it's characters became a real treat.
Having started out somewhat skeptical of how much relevance a 17th century novel could have today, by the end I was very pleasantly surprised and will most certainly revisit this story in the future.
4/5☆
I can highly recommend this book and in particular this well performed narration of the Penguin Classics edition translated by John Rutherford!
It will grow on you...
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