Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

tr by Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman's new translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote is a landmark event. Is it? Really!? Well, yes. Yes it is! The world's first novel is consistantly voted (in all those lists we all - well, I - love: eg the Guardian's hundred best books) as the world's greatest novel. And its claim for this is pretty watertight. And this, Secker's handsome hardback, with a bombastic (as ever) introduction by Harold Bloom, is a lovely edition.

Having avoided doing English at University (for fear it would spoil my one great pleasure, reading - and then becoming a librarian and then going into publishing: so, yes, it was senseless!) I also managed to avoid, for a good long time, many of the classics. I started reading them in earnest a couple of years ago (Dickens, George Eliot, Zola: you know the roll call) and, quite underwhelmingly as an anecdotal denoument, I found that they were good! I was overwhelmed by Middlemarch, hugely moved by Great Expectations, angered, upset, astonished by Germinal. I read a fairly wide smattering of all the best but avoided Don Quixote - too big, too old, probably too hard, probably boring ... but no, no, no, no! Bloom is right, Don Quixote is wonderful, and easily (one of) the very best ...