High Plains Drifter

How—without feeling as addled as its hero—to try to say something new about Don Quixote ? About the work once singled out by the Nobel Institute as the greatest novel of all time? After imperishable tributes by Fielding, Sterne, Samuel Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Faulkner, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Lukács, Borges, Paz, Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera? The lowly academic hack—in this case female, a plumpish Sanchita Panza, without donkey or wineskin or really much more than turista Spanish—feels especially unqualified.

And besides, who really cares? An eminent critic wrote that everybody reads Don Quixote once but few people read it twice. (After one first absorbed it in childhood, Coleridge suggested, it became, like a refreshing wellspring, a work simply to dip into.) I first read Cervantes's comic masterpiece in my early teens, in the classic Samuel Putnam translation from 1949. I've just now read ...