Don Quixote

A gentleman of La Mancha has read so many books of chivalry that he sets out as a knight errant under the name Don Quixote. On a broken-down horse, with Sancho Panza, a talkative and practical farmer, he takes inns for castles and windmills for giants. His expeditions end in beatings and misunderstandings, while his squire waits for his island. The novel explores the distance between ideals and the world, and what his madness reveals about those who mock him. Cervantes mixes farce with melancholy in a book that invents its own commentators.