發明小說的人：塞萬提斯與他的堂吉訶德

by William Egginton, 威廉．埃金頓 (作者中文名), 彭臨桂 (Translator)

　　塞萬提斯的挫敗人生，促使他寫出《堂吉訶德》。
　　但是「壞天氣也要有好臉色。」（A mal tiempo, buena cara）
　　他以樂觀的態度點燃了世界小說的燭光。

　　美國約翰霍普金斯大學教授埃金頓（William Egginton）解析這位「發明小說的人」，
　　從文學、傳記、歷史三方面綜觀塞萬提斯的生活與作品，
　　證明這部小說不僅是塞萬提斯的個人冒險，
　　更是400年來的一部奇蹟之書，啟動全世界的想像力。

　　何以《堂吉訶德》在全世界的暢銷度僅次於《聖經》？並影響之後的文學與思想奠基者，如笛卡兒、休謨、歌德、馬克思、福婁拜、福克納、波赫士、格雷安．葛林、昆德拉等，甚至連美國建國元勳湯瑪斯．傑佛遜，都用這本書自學西班牙文。

　　塞萬提斯所處的16世紀，正是西班牙帝國的黃金時代，美國知名學者威廉．埃金頓，將虛構的《堂吉訶德》抽絲剝繭，透過探索塞萬提斯所處的世界，從文學、傳記、歷史角度，重新建構出小說誕生的背景，窺探小說如何在此時一舉改變全世界閱讀、書寫和思考方式。

　　現代小說原型，脫胎自戲劇與流浪漢小說

　　威廉．埃金頓以「小說」為視角，將塞萬提斯定義為「發明小說的人」。他以平易近人、可讀性高的散文體寫作，宏觀地從世界文學的觀點、塞萬提斯的傳記、西班牙錯綜的歷史與社會等方面，探索塞萬提斯的生平、講述《堂吉訶德》的故事，在虛實交錯中，論述為何塞萬提斯能夠創新寫作，又如何創造出「小說」這項文類。

　　16世紀是西班牙的黃金時代，當時的文類百花齊放，除了歷史、詩，還有戲劇與流浪漢小說。而歷史敘述的是已經發生的事，詩與戲劇則兼具教化與娛樂功能，兩者皆顯得有些局限。塞萬提斯從流浪漢小說文類中體悟出創作必須活化角色、使用隱喻，寫出可能會發生的事實，傳達自身觀點，才是完整呈現真實與虛構的寫作技巧。

　　小說的發明，是一場扣人心弦的冒險

　　埃金頓從「啟發想像力」論述《堂吉訶德》轉變了人們閱讀、書寫和思考的方式，閱讀小說讓人能夠深入思考、想像，體驗自己與他人的世界觀。《堂吉訶德》帶領讀者透過想像力探索真實，成為理解世界的媒介，改變了西方文學與知識史的發展方向，甚至間接影響到後來的哲學、藝術、政治與科學。

　　在塞萬提斯逝世400多年後，埃金頓希望藉由《發明小說的人》讓讀者以嶄新的視野重新認識小說，也體現出塞萬提斯傾注一生的苦難與挫敗，「發明」了西方文學史上第一本暢銷書的冒險故事。

好評推薦

　　★張淑英教授（臺灣大學外國語文學系教授／西班牙皇家學院外籍院士）專文導讀
　　★全球學者、作家傾心推薦

　　威廉．埃金頓針對塞萬提斯在西方文學發展中的關鍵角色來論述，此著作不但引人入勝，更深具啟發。他不刻意使用艱澀的行話，而是採用散文體，從文學、傳記、歷史三方面綜觀塞萬提斯的生活與作品，充分印證了本書的絕妙標題。──伊迪絲．葛羅斯曼（Edith Grossman）《堂吉訶德》及其他西班牙文名作之著名英譯者

　　如同本書所示，塞萬提斯不僅早已確立了我們對小說的概念，他更加以調整、給予形式，使其成為可能。《發明小說的人》引領我們踏上一趟旅程，經歷作家多災多難的人生，說明他的困境、挫敗與失望，最後融合成一本奇蹟之書，並在書中重現這些因素，同時從中得到救贖。──安德烈斯．紐曼（Andrés Neuman）《世紀旅人》（Traveler of the Century）作者豐泉小說獎（Alfaguara Prize）得主

　　埃金頓的研究深刻剖析了《堂吉訶德》，此書和蒙田的《隨筆集》是當代唯一能夠與莎士比亞之超然影響力抗衡的作品。關於莎士比亞，我們只知道一些無關緊要的事，他的本質隱藏在其劇本的小宇宙之中。然而對於塞萬提斯和蒙田，我們幾乎無所不知，因為他們都變成了自己的主題。《發明小說的人》確切體現了塞萬提斯以自身苦難和艱困得來的智慧，並以此打造出永恆成就。──哈羅德．布魯姆（Harold Bloom）耶魯大學人文學科史特林講座教授（Sterling Professor）

　　塞萬提斯真的是發明小說的人嗎？埃金頓以極有力的論點證明《堂吉訶德》從此轉變了人們閱讀、書寫和思考的方式──並且吸引了各式各樣的崇拜者，包括笛卡兒、休謨、馬克思、波赫士，以及格雷安．葛林。埃金頓所呈現的塞萬提斯，歷經了跌宕起伏、多災多難的人生，而他似乎也正因如此才能淬鍊出卓越的創作，亦即形影不離的堂吉訶德與桑丘．潘薩，他們的情誼顛覆了十六世紀流浪漢小說的殘酷傳統，藉此展現了個人信念的強大力量。《發明小說的人》就如同《堂吉訶德》，展現出一個鼓舞人心的冒險故事。──英格麗．D．羅蘭德（Ingrid D. Rowland）聖母大學建築學教授

　　頌揚一部廣受喜愛的小說及其富有創意的作者……針對十六世紀的西班牙生活、政治與文化，埃金頓廣博的歷史敘述使人讀起來欲罷不能。──科克斯書評（Kirkus Reviews）

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Criticism, Literature, Biography Memoir, Literary Criticism

352 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2016

About the author

William Egginton is a literary critic and philosopher. He has written extensively on a broad range of subjects, including theatricality, fictionality, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and ethics, religious moderation, and theories of mediation. William Egginton was born in Syracuse, New York in 1969. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1999. His doctoral thesis, "Theatricality and Presence: a Phenomenology of Space and Spectacle in Early Modern France and Spain," was written under the direction of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. He currently resides with his wife, Bernadette Wegenstein, and their three children, in Baltimore, Maryland. William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy.

Reviews

[Lisa Feld · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could more accurately be called The Man Who Invented (Meta)Fiction. Eggington dances back and forth between talking about Cervantes's life and his art, trying to explain both what Cervantes did that was unique and what in his life and personality gave him the perspective to try something new. But Eggington's claims that Cervantes was the first to give his characters a complex and contradictory inner life (Shakespeare? Montaigne?) or have characters disagree about how they perceive a situation (Chaucer? Boccaccio?) falls flat, and what remains is the fascinating idea that in the foreword and notes of Don Quixote, Cervantes became the first author to create fictional versions of himself and his friends, playing with the boundaries between fiction and reality.

There were some fascinating details of Cervantes's life throughout this book, such as the irony that he fled Spain and joined the army to avoid having his right hand cut off for dueling ... only to lose his left hand in battle. And Eggington's enthusiasm for Cervantes's wit, compassion, and insight are infectious. But I found it hard to trust his statements as facts because he declares that one brief passage where a fictional character meets a friend who "called me father and I called him son" means that Cervantes had a secret love child, and uses Cervantes's version of his actions in battle as simple fact without considering that Cervantes may have been exaggerating or gilding the lily. I also found Eggington's writing style difficult: every single chapter begins with "As Cervantes experienced X, he must have felt Y," followed by a quick sketch of context, some random facts, and some literary discussion, leaping about in time and not even totally focused on one subject. There were also times when Eggington made declarative statements and waited a dozen pages to give even oblique evidence or explanation. I would have liked a more linear biography that offered the details of Cervantes's early misadventures and later financial straits for context and then got into his failed career as a playwright and the ways in which he used his life experiences and his quirky view of theater to create a new genre.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Don Quixote" is one of my favorite novels of all time and so I was destined to get a hold of this book as soon as I could. It was good to know more about Cervantes and to get a handle on some of the links between his life and works, but there was too little depth throughout and some of the links were a little tenuous. It started well and I really thought it was going to be enlightening, but it soon went downhill, and I just felt relief when it ended.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.

One of my dirty secrets is that I have never read all of Don Quixote. I have read parts at various points since I was about seven or eight. I have read some of Cervantes other work. But all of Don Quixote, nope.

But after reading this book, I think I am going to change that.

Egginton’s book about one of the most famous books in the world, argues, quite persuasively that Don Quixote was far more revolutionary than people give it credit for.

While Egginton does an excellent job at proving his thesis, what also comes across is his love for the book as well as his fascination with Cervantes. It’s hard not to feel excited about the book after Egginton’s book.

It is difficult not to see the humor in DQ, even without having read the whole book. Egginton makes an argument for a more subtle and important reading. He writes, “Cervantes’s narratives function by constantly leading us to question the intent behind the descriptions, by pointing to the difference between the masks the characters show to one another and the internal feelings and emotions that animate them”. This is something that carries over to almost every novel and writer afterwards. It is now that we have in good fiction moved beyond types.

And this is part of Egginton’s contention that whether or not Cervantes knew it, he was writing in rejection of Aristotle and the other critics, what was then canon. Egginton best sums this up when he writes, “Boccaccio’s characters end at the limits of what they can see; Cervantes’s begin there”. Furthermore, Egginton links Cervantes to the modern day, for the man’s humor, so Egginton, is of the human race as opposed to of a certain time.

Poop jokes rule the world.

True, that.

If anything, Egginton’s book proves that Cervantes is human and that he is great writer because he remembers that important fact.

Egginton’s book isn’t so much a biography or even a literary biography, but a history that becomes for pages and pages, a love letter that isn’t addressed to the book or to the author, but to the reader.

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fully 4 Stars.
Possibly 5.

Accessible and Knowledgeable.

The joy Professor Eggington finds in reading and discussing Don Quixote the novel proves to be contagious. The compassion Eggington feels for Cervantes shines through. Words flow out of Eggington's understanding out onto pages and out on audiobook.

I read this book in preparation of rereading Don Quixote. I have read the novel several times in various forms. Yet I could never really wrap my brain around the text. It was already a struggle. Until now.

If you are struggling to understand the novel, I recommend reading this book. Eggington makes the subject accessible.

[Leanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in preparation of reading the Quixote. The bibliographical information and basic cultural and historical contexts were really incredibly well done--and another bonus is it is easy and pleasurable to read. Did you know Cervantes had to flee Spain after dual when he was found guilty and would lose his right hand as punishment? Ironically, he lost his left hand in the Battle of Lepanto where he had gone to fight in order to do something so heroic that they would have to let him back into Spain. He was a courageous fighter and was allowed back but as luck would have it, his boat was boarded by Barbary pirates and he was taken hostage. I am really looking forward to reading a book by Cervantes scholar María Antonia Garcés called Cervantes in Algiers that explores how this history of being held hostage influenced his literary mind. Garcés was herself held hostage and claims that the books she was allowed by her captors kept her alive.

Egginton does a great job exploring all of this. He also is fantastic on imperial Spain--a decidedly cruel period of imperialistic history by all accounts. The obsession with blood purity had begun well before Cervantes birth and Egginton is great on how this effected Cervantes life trajectory.

As to the central argument and the book's title; well, it is problematic to say the least. Tale of Genji was hundreds of years prior and was modern in many of the ways that Don Quixote is claimed to be. That said, I am fine with unprovable arguments like this one since the level of correlation between Cervantes' fiction, Descartes philosophy and the modern idea of the self is really noteworthy. This was an extremely fun and thought-provoking read.

[The American Conservative]

“Life is absurd,” William Egginton tells us in his new book about Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote, “so laugh—but also feel, because life’s travails hurt others as much as they hurt you.”

Egginton, an accomplished scholar of Romance literatures, is not solely to blame for this kind of silly TED Talk. We don’t really want to read Cervantes, or any other classics for that matter. Instead, we want to read memoirs about other people reading them. Rather than Middlemarch, these days we read Rebecca Mead’s memoir of reading Middlemarch; Maryanne Wolf and Alain de Botton on Proust; Stephen Marche on Shakespeare; A.J. Jacobs on the Bible; Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne; Christopher Beha on the Harvard Classics; and now, coinciding with the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s death, William Egginton on Don Quixote. Unlike the demure reading guides of years past—Harry Blamires’s New Bloomsday Book for Ulysses comes to mind, and also B.C. Southam’s A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot for The Waste Land—these newer efforts are assuredly self-focused, offering first-person arguments for why these books continue to matter, not in and of themselves, but to us, for us.

http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Jo-Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned that in 1995 UNESCO declared April 23rd the International Day of the Book, partly because it of the nearly simultaneous death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare in 1616. This book has a great deal of interesting information on Miguel de Cervantes, his life and times, his writing and Don Quixote. Though very interesting and enlightening, I did find the book a tough read. The idea that Cervantes invented fiction was thought provoking. The author also implies that Cervantes influenced Descartes and the modern world with his ideas and perspectives. This is a book that I may reread after having read some of Cervantes' body of work.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have rated it higher if I'd finished the book. Had to return it to the library, so hopefully at some point I will be able to finish this book. It was a fascinating biography, and while a lot of the literary analysis was interesting, he may have overstated the importance of some of what Cervantes did by failing to acknowledge the influence other authors and other countries have had on the concept of fiction.

[Pete · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit too theoretical/academic/"lit crit" for my taste. The biographical bits were more interesting.

[Valdemar Lenschow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Den var spændende, en god blanding af litterær teori, historisk kontekst og Cervantes egen fortælling, men jeg er endnu ikke helt sikker på, at jeg køber påstanden, der præsenteres allerede i titlen.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite its grandiose title and flawed central thesis (more on that in a moment), this is an eminently readable, informative, and fun book. In a brisk 184 pages, Egginton simultaneously traces the biography of Cervantes with the development of his most eminent creation, Don Quixote de La Mancha. Tackling the central theme of that epic story, the human desire/incapability of discerning reality from what we WANT it to be, Egginton claims that this is in fact the definition of fiction, that we concurrently know we are watching/reading an illusion but also closely identifying with the reality within that construct and how it mimics or betters our lives. He claims that Cervantes invented fiction, the idea that "real" life is reflected in literary art but also blurred by imagination. This simply ignores the history of literature on multiple levels, proving Egginton himself to be quixotic in his search for Cervantes himself. Cervantes isn't even the first author to place himself within his own literary construct (Chaucer springs to mind). And certainly he can't sustain the claim that no other authors have explored this dichotomy, from Greco-Roman drama and mythology to Cervantes's contemporary, Shakespeare. However, this is one of the first attempts to do so in the modality of the novel, the idea of a work of sustained prose, a differentiation that Egginton never makes. Semantics aside, this is a fun and great book that is as fun to read as Cervantes himself. Highly recommended for all lovers of Don Quixote.

[Serg]

With a claim as provocative and unarguable as Harold Bloom’s claim in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, I expected a greater preponderance of evidence. Instead William Egginton provides mostly biography mixed with a touch of literary analysis. Which is neither good or bad. I simply wanted a better defense of his claim. The subtitle to this book is “How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World.” Egginton never really explains how Cervantes did this..

It starts promisingly enough, with a great picture of Cervantes delivering his manuscript to the publisher. It’s a strange picture to envision, and something not many of us do--to imagine the geniuses immediately after finishing their work but before making it known to the world. But besides this, a lot of the biography is standard fare and does not illuminate how Cervantes invented fiction with Don Quixote. Some of the text analysis does bolster his mighty claim… but most of the text analysis in the book has already been expounded on by others. There’s little fresh or new here.

I don’t know. I do admire this book, and I do believe Egginton’s claim that Cervantes invented fiction. Or at least something along those lines. I don’t doubt that what Cervantes with Don Quixote is something akin to invent fiction. It doesn’t take a good writer to notice that. But it does take a good writer to defend such a claim. I mean, as a popular intro to Cervantes this book is fine. But for in-depth analysis go to Miguel de Unamuno and Erich Auerbach.

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I was reading this book, I mentioned the title to several friends and family and asked them to whom they thought "The Man Who Invented Fiction" applied. I got a number of good answers, but none were Cervantes. This is not necessarily a reflection on the lack of literary chops of my homies as Professor Egginton himself admits that not all of his colleagues in erudite literary circles agree with his premise. I read Don Quixote as a high school junior so I will not be too hard on my callow self for missing all of the insights that Egginton has derived from that work. I may well read it again to try to figure out what he is talking about. I valued this book primarily as a biography of Cervantes and as a history of the status of literature in the 15th and 16th centuries. Most of the stuff about why fiction was created by Cervantes was too deep for me, although I tried to wade through it as best I could waiting for more of the story of Cervantes's life and times.

[Kavinda Ratnapala · Rating 4 out of 5]

A biography of Cervantes written from the point of view of his greatest creation The Don. Blending the highest skills of a novella with the academic rigour of a post doc researcher. Egginton has truly done himself and his teacher proud for producing such an honest account of events drawing on sources most of which a centuries old.

While his thesis is open to critique at multiple points the trajectory of the book makes it abundantly clear that while the better part of human attainment can be attributed to man's capacity to reproduce. Cervantes can be justifiably recognised for truly inventing something a new. The novel as we know it with character development and plos which has their highs and lows truly did not exist prior to the crippled war veteran from the crusades- Cervantes

A must read for anyone who has found Solace in a novel.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A hungry reporter with a need to pay the rent tells an approximate fairy tale about someone long dead. Greek drama, stories about how the gods quarrel, or delirious accounts of how the Earth was made by some god who thought the sky was hard as a hardwood floor. Fairy tales (like this one), and hero legends, yet is Cervantes the one who invented fiction. Nice.

William Egginton seems to have read the comics about the life of Cervantes and now he is ready to tell it all. Smartphones, tanks and vaccination were 'ushered' by an old man somewhere where today there is Spain.

What about novels in China and Japan? Who cares! White power!

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very readable work of Cervantes criticism (which can't be said for many others), and Egginton's claim that Cervantes created (modern) fiction and therefore changed the way we thought about our world and ourselves is convincing (but reading Don Quixote already convinced me of that!). I suppose what I wanted more of was analysis of his fiction--a close reading and a break down of what, specifically, in DQ and others, was so revolutionary for the time--to prove the case, rather than a mostly historical and biographical approach. Overall, though, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Rachel Brune · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional delving into the work of Don Quixote and its author. I enjoyed the writing, and thought the book was organized well. Lots of food for thought here on the central topic of Cervantes as the inventor of fiction as a space where the illusion of reality and the judgments on those illusions can coexist. I highly recommend to others interested in the philosophy of art and fiction.

[Bob Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I have never read Don Quixote. I wanted to know what all the fuss wa about. This book by Egginton answers the question in great detail. As a result I stopped about 2/3 of the way through as I felt I had gotten the idea. Well worth the read.

[Charles Dingman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Approachable scholarship that challenges my presuppositions about literature before Cervantes.

[Peter Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the Rigor of Angels so much I decided to read this book about Cervantes by William Egginton. The first time I tried to read Don Quixote I gave up after a few chapters. I thought Don Quixote would join the list of books that I have tried to read and failed to finish. The list includes The Critique of Pure Reason by Emmanuelle Kant, which I mentioned in a recent review, Of Grammatology by Jacque Derrida, The Order of Things by Michael Foucault, S/Z by Roland Barthes, a collection of essays by Charles Pierce and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language by Umberto Eco.

I returned to Don Quixote after a couple of years and this time I finished. I read it as an audio book and I remember listening to it on a stationary bicycle at the YMCA outpost in Winooski. That branch of the Y closed a while ago.

I read Don Quixote for the last time when I was in a book club. I believe Don Quixote is a very important book, which has influenced writers ever since its publication but it is not one of my favorites. Maybe part of the reason is my focus on books written in English. I have more context for Shakespeare, for example, than Cervantes. They were contemporaries. Whenever I venture into a literary tradition I am not familiar with I soon feel overwhelmed by the number of authors I have not read. If I were to study Cervantes seriously I would want to read all the books of chivalry mentioned in Don Quixote, and that would be just the beginning. I also felt lost when I read The Divine Comedy and when I read the Russian classics. There is always so much more to learn!

[Jalen Sowell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The line between what is reality and what is a person’s interpretation of it hasn’t always been clear. For centuries, monarchies and governments used their monopoly on power and censorship to ensure that everyone’s reality aligned with the interests of those in power.

There was only two types of prevalent literature - history and poetry. History, written by the victors, was always romantic and told in a way that encouraged more of a certain behavior. Poetry was an attempt as telling the future and the direction of society.

The printing press and Don Quixote allowed for a new type of literature - one where the author challenged people to view the same event from multiple perspectives. It was no longer about right and wrong, but about how multiple different people can have different interpretations of the same event. It opened people up to the idea that maybe there was more to their story than the ideas that they had been handed, and perhaps the world was more nuanced and subjective than they’d been led to believe.

The book itself I give 3 stars for chasing a million rabbit trails. It could’ve been a short, 100-page book. A ton of fluff.

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mix of a biography of Cervantes, a history of Spain at the time of the writing of Don Quixote, and literary criticism of same. Not all of these elements are equally represented: Cervantes's biography is by far the weakest, though that's because the historical records are skimpy and, even when they do exist, not always trustworthy. The literary criticism is the strongest part of The Man Who Invented Fiction, and I appreciated it for being the first explanation of what people mean when they call Don Quixote the "world's first novel" that actually makes sense to me. It's less about the term 'novel' – which, no matter how you define it, is inevitably going to include many dozens of earlier books – and more about style of writing, focused on limited POVs and metanarratives. Plus the enthusiasm of a bunch of 19th century German philosophers, who decided to retroactively make their favorite book an important book.

There are better histories of Spain out there, but if you want one book that covers everything in relatively few pages and with an engaging narrative voice, this is the one to choose.

[Rafa Willisch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading The Man Who Invented Fiction. The author, William Egginton, explains how Miguel de Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote, helped create the kind of storytelling we now call fiction. Egginton shows how Cervantes changed the way stories were told by focusing on characters’ inner lives, imagination, and the blurry line between reality and fantasy.

The book is easy to follow, even if you're not an expert in literature. It mixes history, philosophy, and literary analysis in a very engaging way. I especially liked learning how Cervantes' personal experiences—like being a soldier, a prisoner, and a tax collector—influenced his writing.

After reading this book, I feel inspired to go back and re-read Don Quixote. I think I’ll appreciate it much more now, especially knowing how groundbreaking it was for its time.

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turgenev, in what remains my favorite piece of literary criticism, declared that "Before the invincible spirit of the English poet [Shakespeare] everything that is human seems to yield, whereas the wealth of Cervantes is derived solely from his own heart;a heart that is warm, genial and rich with experience yet not become callous." Egginton seeks to understand how this "warm, genial and rich" heart not only wrote the first piece of fiction, but how he responded to the centuries of tradition which emerged in his wake.

* The Turgenev essay: http://www.donquixote.com/uploads/4/3...

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

My review is very subjective and not really a diss of the book’s quality; I’m sure it’s me. I can’t seem to read non-fiction any more unless it’s extremely propulsive narratively. This felt slightly too academic for me, I think, though I’m quite interested in the themes - I really slogged through. I’d get into it for ten pages and then just - stuck. I’ve also never read Don Quixote though I’m not sure that matters. I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I think it’s where I’m at. Maybe it’s also because it’s a mix of biography and straight up literary criticism, and it really jumps around a lot. I just couldn’t get into it.

[Vilo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book about the life of Miguel Cervantes, the importance of his most well known book Don Quijote and the history which informed and shaped his life and work. It is bold to say that he invented fiction, but just as painters of his era were experimenting with principles such as perspective that made painting more realistic and three dimensional, Cervantes was among the first authors to experiment with fiction that let us see into the inner life of the character as well as how the character appears to others.

[Evan Hanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly fascinating work that lets you see how Cervantes life and the time a he lived in impacted his most famous work. Well worth the read if you are at all interested in the creation an impact of Don Quixote.

[Maher Battuti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written and well referenced book .
I would have liked if it referred to the mother of all novels and fiction : The Arabian Nights, especially that Cervantes fictionally attributed his gem to an Arab author.

[Gerrit · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent primer on Quixote, and the world he inhabited and incorporated into his masterwork.

[Lois Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not easy read but it taught me a huge amount not only about Cervantes and the history of Spain.