Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’ is often claimed to be the first modern novel, and all in all it was a start but proved the form of the novel certainly had some places to go. It just felt unnecessarily long, and yet the plot feels fractured and hard to follow and the only characters who have meaningful roles and are remotely developed are Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panca. It tells of a man called Don Quixote, who believes himself a knight and recruits Sancho as his squire for the quest to save a damsel called Dulciena who he believes he is in love with. In seeing inns as castles and windmills as giants his knightly errants are entirely fictional and surprisingly ‘Don Quixote’ could be seen as an extremely early depiction of dissociative identity disorder (not that this would’ve been the intention and therefore be presented well).

Though regarded by all around him as insane you can appreciate the view Don Quixote has towards the world, he has imagination and sees magic in the mundane, which is commendable and a fun outlook on life. Quixote has the ability to view the world as something greater than it appears to be. His various follies, which often lack any form of aim or conclusion, do result in a meta-narrative being written as various writers within the story record Quixote’s adventures, Cervantes even naming himself and praising his own poetry. The book is littered with excerpts of poetry throughout which is a nice inclusion and honestly reads much better than the primary novel, yet I find it funny but also hubristic the praise Cervantes gives himself in his own magnum opus. 

The narrators tone also draws away from immersion in the primary narrative, announcing the likes of  "here ends the second book" which stage the book to be more of a history than a narrative. Hence it also seems to wrap up narrative arcs far too quickly and conclude, there is no build up to the ending and it just seems to happen. This was certainly a bucket list book but not a hugely rewarding read, it did coin the word ‘Quixotic’ though.