Quixote
The Novel and the World
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world.
The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model.
In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tracing four centuries of influence of what hispanophones affectionately call "el Quijote," Stavans (A Most Imperfect Union) takes an entertainingly idiosyncratic look at Don Quijote, the "novel of novels." Offering more cultural history than literary criticism, Stavans begins with the novel as a product both of a man and an age. He progressively broadens his scope to examine the wildly varied interpretations of it, including a "cornerstone of Western civilization," a foundation of Spanish nationhood, and the novel that "begat modernity." Stavans's work has the tone of a conversational lecture, with room for occasional digressions and jokes, but all the confident precision and clarity of a scholar working with material he knows and loves. Though an admirer, Stavans is no purist (or "Cervantisto"); he appreciates the variations wrought by numerous translations, including his own rendition of one passage into Spanglish, as much as the evolving applications of Quijote as adjective (quixotic), ideology (quijotismo), and Japanese retail chain (Donki). In the process, he defines the nature of this literary classic and shows the many ways in which Don Quijote has "unquestionably shaped our culture," not just of Spain but of the Americas. A combination of celebration, meditation, and quest, Stavans's book is bound to please el Quijote's devoted readers and win new fans. Illus.
