Cervantes’ tale of a man obsessed with chivalric fiction could be the most idler-friendly book ever. Henry Eliot on the multi-layered masterpiece that is Don Quixote

In 2002 the Nobel Institute invited 100 authors from 54 countries to nominate the books they felt had had the most decisive impact on the cultural history of the world. The results were distilled into a list of 100 titles and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – the early 17th-century Spanish masterpiece – was declared “the greatest book of all time”. What the Nobel Institute failed to observe was that Don Quixote is also an exuberant hymn to the core Idler values: slowing down, having fun and living well.

Our protagonist is a model of slow living: Don Quixote is a “hidalgo”, or country gentleman, in his late 40s, who likes to wear comfortable clothes and eat simple food. He keeps a clapped-out horse and a greyhound, but most of his time is spent on the greatest of all slow pursuits: reading. “During his idle moments (which accounted for most of the year),” explains Cervantes, “this hidalgo took to reading books of chivalry with such relish and enthusiasm that he almost forgot about his hunting.” Quixote spends all his money on an impressive library of tales about knights-errant such as Amadis of Gaul.

His enthusiasm is extreme: he comes to believe he is a knight-errant himself. “The lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad,” says Cervantes. On one level the novel is presented as a satire on the perils of reading fiction. Fifty years before the book’s publication a petition had been presented to Charles I of Spain complaining of the damage done by “nonsense like Amadis and all its imitations” and calling for books of chivalry to be burned. Similarly Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper are horrified by his ravings and burn his “evil books”.

The delicious irony is that we are reading a work of fiction ourselves, enjoying exactly the kind of episodic, romantic tale that Cervantes is apparently decrying. He obviously enjoyed the paradox. He opens Don Quixote with a prologue addressed to the “idle reader”. We are immediately categorised with Don Quixote; like him, we are using our leisure time to read a work of fiction. Cervantes even lumps himself with the authors in Don Quixote’s library: as the books are being burned, one is revealed to be Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes.

This brings us to the second tenet of the Idler philosophy: having fun – and Cervantes clearly was while writing Don Quixote. For a start he nests his tale in a sequence of narrators: the adventures are recorded by an unreliable historian, whose text is translated by a temperamental translator, whose work is discovered by Cervantes among a bundle of scrap papers in a silk merchant’s shop in Toledo. These fragmented layers allow him to play with broken narratives, interpolated stories and various levels of commentary. “If anything worthwhile is missing,” he shrugs, “[. . .] it’s my belief that it’s the dog of an author who wrote it that’s to blame.”

But the real stroke of genius comes in the second volume. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in two volumes: the first was a huge success in 1605 and so, 10 years later, he published a sequel. The second instalment picks up from the end of the first, but Cervantes brilliantly incorporates references to the earlier book’s popularity: Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza start to encounter people who have read Don Quixote. As their fame spreads they gradually become as celebrated as if they really were the heroes of a chivalric age. Towards the end of the book Don Quixote walks into a Barcelona printing house and finds them typesetting a book of his own adventures.

If Don Quixote shows us how to slow down and Cervantes demonstrates how to have fun, then the act of reading this novel can teach us how to live well. In both volumes we are forced to assess the ambiguous nature of Don Quixote’s madness. He seems rational and often impresses others with the lucidity of his conversation, and yet he claims to see giants instead of windmills, enchanters instead of friars, castles instead of inns. Perhaps the answer is in what he admits to Sancho. “To put it in a nutshell,” he says, “I imagine that everything I say is precisely as I say it is.” His madness is perhaps a lifestyle choice: he chooses not to inhabit the drabness of reality; instead he lives in his own world of magic and adventure, in which he is the romantic hero. Others may laugh at him, but who is the real winner? By the end of the book we find ourselves siding with the romantics and the dreamers, with the courage, perhaps, to see the world in an entirely new way.

Don Quixote is sometimes described as the first modern novel. Cervantes called it “a web of beautiful and varied threads which, once complete, will display such perfection and loveliness that it will attain the highest goal to which writing can aspire: giving instruction and pleasure together”.

Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book.

All quotations are taken from the Penguin Classics edition of Don Quixote, translated by John Rutherford.

This article is from Idler #79.

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