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Display of book about Don Quixote of La Mancha

The book

• The Valorous and Witty Don Quixote of La Mancha was first published in 1605, being the first modern European novel ever written.
• It relates the adventures of Don Alonso Quijano a country gentleman who becomes mad because of reading too many books of chivalry and subsequently thinks him to be a knight-errant devoted to right wrongs, correct injustices, ameliorate abuses and rectify offenses.
• Riding his ailing horse, Rocinante, and together with his squire, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote toils along the plains of Spain, where the rain mainly falls, from a place in La Mancha-whose name nobody cares to remember- to Barcelona. He confronts the most extraordinary adventures for the sake of the weak and the honor of his lady, Dulcinea del Toboso, Empress of La Mancha, whom he never manages to meet.
• Don Quixote fights against windmills taking them for giants; charges against flocks of sheep believing they are enemy armies; dares deep into the dark cave of Montesinos appealing to the protection of Dulcinea; rides the flying wooden horse Clavileño to disenchant a helpless countess; challenges other apparent knights in glittering jousts; liberates some dangerous criminals taking then for innocent captives; and participates in a naval battle, among other many adventures. Eventually his friends will manage to bring Don Quixote back home, where he recovers his good senses.
• The characters we meet are very numerous, about 150 men and 50 women. We can also add 160 songs and 150 dishes.

The author

• Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcala de Henares in 1547, probably the 29th of September, the fourth out of seven children.
• He studied possibly in Valladolid first and then in Madrid. He never finished university studies.
• As a result of injuring somebody he fled to Rome in 1569, only to go later on to Naples, a kingdom united to the crown of Spain. There he became a soldier of the Spanish army and fought in the naval battle of Lepanto, on the 7 October of 1571, where the European fleet, commanded by the Spanish prince Don Juan de Austria, defeats the Ottoman fleet.
• In that battle Cervantes behaved like a hero because, albeit he was suffering from a severe fever, he insisted on fighting, and did it so bravely that he was rewarded with an extra pay and letters of recommendation of Don Juan de Austria himself. In Lepanto he was severely wounded in his left arm.
• Cervantes continued for four years his military profession before going back to Spain in 1575, but on his way home he was captured by pirates. He also behaved like a hero during his five year long captivity in Algiers including four attempts to escape.
• He was rescued in 1580 by the Trinitarians friars after paying a big ransom, Cervantes came back to Spain. Failing to obtain a job in America, he obtained a temporary job in the north of Africa, Orán, and then went to live in Madrid. The 12th December 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar. Before that, he had a daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, with Franca de Rojas. From 1587 to 1600 he lived in Seville as a tax collector. He failed again to go to America and he was put into prison for three months after the bankruptcy of the bank where he had deposited collected taxes
• From 1603 onwards Cervantes lived in Valladolid with his family: his wife and daughter, two of his sisters and one niece, all of whom apparently lead rather ill reputed lives. In 1605 he was put again into prison one day because of being falsely accused of involvement in a murder that took place at the doorsteps of his house. That year the publication of the first part of Don Quixote took place. Cervantes was 58 when the first part appeared and 68 when the second one came to light in 1615. In 1606 he moved to Madrid with his family until his death in his home at the street of El León, on the 22 of April 1616.
• He was buried the following day, on the same date when Shakespeare died, but not the same day because there is an eleven day difference in the Julian calendar then still used in England and the new Gregorian one already used in Spain. Garcilaso de la Vega, another famous Spanish writer also died that very day.

Success of the book

• Don Quixote has been a best seller form the very beginning. Already in 1615 the first part had sold 12.000 copies, an extraordinary figure for the time. It is the most translated book after the Bible, and the third most sold. It has inspire odd 400 films and 80 pieces of music, including around 33 ballets, 17 operas, 13 operettas or zarzuelas and at least one musical. Only in the Spanish and English languages there are more than 1.200 editions. It has been chosen as the best fiction book ever written by a group of 100 writers of more than 45 countries.
• Don Quixote is one of the most universal characters of European literature, together with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s Beatrix, the only one who can be immediately recognize in a drawing or that has not a precedent in previous European traditions.
• We must not forget either two other universal characters created by the Spanish literature: Don Juan, prototype of the male lover, and La Celestina, prototype of the immoral woman.
• Among the authors usually mentioned as directly inspired by Don Quixote we count: GK Chesterton, Alfonse Daudet, Fedor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Graves, Graham Greene, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Herman Melville, Bernard Shaw, Frederick Schelegel, Frederick Stendhal, Frederick Schun, Ivan Turgueniev, and many others.
• Don Quixote has inspired musicians such as Ruperto Chapí, Gaetano Donizetti, Manuel de Falla, Philippe Fenelon, Jean Kurt Forest, Robert Gerhard, Giovanni Antonio Giay, Ernesto and Cristóbal Halfter, Hans Werner Henze, Wilhem Kienzl, Mitch Leigh, Jules Massanet, Felix Mendelssohn, Ludwig Minkus, Henry Purcell, Maurice Ravel, Jean Rivier, Antonio Salieri, Richard Strauss, Georg-Philip Teleman, Mark Twain, and José Luis Turina.
• One of the most brilliant ballet productions about Don Quixote is precisely an Australian production of Minkus ballet, made by Rudolph Nurijev and the Australian National Ballet in 1973. The musical The Man from La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion won five Tony Awards, including the best musical, and in the sixties it was the third longest represented musical of Broadway.
• Don Quixote is also the main character of countless works of art by artists such as, Miquel Barceló, Salvador Dalí, De La Croix, Dummier, William Hoghart, Picasso and so many others.
• Since the XVIII century is uncontested that Cervantes’ importance to the Spanish language is tantamount to the importance of Shakespeare to the English one, or of Goethe to the German.
• That is why the Cervantes price, the equivalent in the Spanish language of the Nobel Prize of Literature bears the name of the writer of Don Quixote. Further, this price is granted by the King of Spain every year in Alcalá de Henares the birth town of Cervantes, on the date of Cervantes burial, the 23rd April. Moreover, the same date has been declared by UNESCO the International Day of the Book, at the request of the International Union of Publishers.

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