Don Quixato (堂吉诃德)
Don Quixato is a famous novel written by a Spanish novelist ,Cervantes（塞万提斯）.Cervantes is born in October 9, 1547.And he dead in April 23,1616.
The novel is actually two novels stuck together.Cervantes published the first half, which became an incredible succe.Years later, he published the second part which relates the third adventure of the Don.The effect that this has on the book is that all the major characters in the Part II have all ready read Part I, making the book incredibly self-referential.Cervantes also has fun in mocking a spurious Part II by another author that was published at the time.As for the plot, a country hidalgo named Alonzo Quixato spends his time reading chivalric romances.One day, he decides to become a knight errant named Don Quixote.He convinces a simple neighbor who speaks in proverbs, Sancho（桑乔）, to come along with him to be his squire.Quixote is crazy and Sancho is a fool - except that they seem to be preternaturally sane and wise when the chips are down What can anyone say about Don Quixote that hasn\'t been said? The book\'s been around for four hundred years, has inspired virtually every literary movement from the eighteenth-century picaresque to the most obscure works of twenty-first century postmodernism.Don Quixote is one of the few books that merits casual references with the definite article (\"The Quixote\"), and additionally is one of the few books to spawn a universally-recognized adjective (\"quixotic\").How to even approach a book like Don Quixote, a book that has been, at some time or other, all things to all people? How to evaluate a cultural monolith? The simplest way, of course, is just to pay attention to the fact that Don Quixote, four hundred years after its initial publication, is still a hell of a read! Sure, there are rough patches, yet: the mini-novels that interrupt the narrative of the first part for a hundred-odd pages would have been easy targets for some modern publisher\'s blue pencil, the long eays on arms or piety can ring strangely to reader sensibilities, the descriptions are sometimes a vague me, and yet the basic story, the basic concept holds up.It\'s hard to stay mad at Don Quixote: as frustrating as the plot can be at times, some archetypal lure lurks within the world of Cervantes\'s Spain, some magic that draws us in, much like the world of chivalry that continues to draw Quixote himself through the progreively more painful wringer of situations.In general, this is why Don Quixote remains one hell of a read--even today.The reader faces, in the same moment, an ideal view of the world (the world as enchanted, antiquated, idyllic) and the brutal facts of the actual world (the world as material, modern, loath to believe in knights.) Quixote hacks at the belly of ogres in an inn basement, and is rewarded by a jet of wine in his face and a hefty bill for damages.He tries to rid the land of giants, and is spun, lance-first, by a powerful windmill he spears in the attempt.He attempts to liberate a statue of the Virgin Mary, which he believes to be a damsel in distre, from her captors, and in return is beaten up by priests.
Throughout, Sancho is there to say exactly what the reader is likely thinking--those aren\'t giants; Dulcinea isn\'t beautiful; none of this can be real--only to be rewarded with a lecture from Don Quixote about how he is beset by enchanters, who frustrate his every move by replacing the facts of his world, at the last moment, with devil\'s illusions that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to our own reality.It\'s a single joke repeated acro a thousand pages, and yet it\'s strong enough to bring a laugh every time.Quixote\'s insistence on his own madne in the face of innumerable arguments to the contrary, many of which take the form of cat scratches, cracked bones and miing teeth, makes him an interesting character because we know--or we think we know--that Quixote is just wrong.Yet, despite all of the pain he suffers in pursuit of that wrong, he continues to believe that he\'s right.So we read on page-after-page, waiting to see how much more the man who believes himself a knight is able to take before he gives in--whether, in the end, Quixote will give in at all.We read not only for page-after-page, but for year-after-year, century-after-century, pulled by the cognitive dionance that surrounds the knight like his own cloud of malicious enchanters.In the proce, just as Quixote builds his castles from inns and criminal campfires, so we build castles of speculation from what we find in Cervantes\'s Spain, at once so brutally real and so dream-like, the realm of archetype and myth founded on dreary life.We, like Don Quixote, are driven to hallucinate by what might be, in the end, just a very good story.With Don Quixote, Cervantes has accomplished an enduring act of literary alchemy: just as Quixote is combined with Sancho, so is fantasy combined with reality, the eternal with the everyday, and like the combination of matter and anti-matter, the explosion of aesthetic power is, in magnitude, infinite, propelling readers from the earth--at first facing inward at what was left behind on the page, then, forgetting the earth, outward into meaning--farther and farther toward the dream-like stars.
