Don Quijote de la Mancha

He soon draws into the adventure Sancho Panza, a practical, gullible farmhand won over by the promise of governing an island. Between the two of them the whole book beats. Don Quixote sees giants where there are windmills and charges with lance at the ready; the wind turns the sails, shatters the lance, and drags him tumbling across the field. Didn't I tell your worship... that these were nothing but windmills? Sancho protests, and in that counterpoint lives Cervantes's satire: the ideal and the solid ground, the proverb and the delirium.

What follows is a string of encounters along the roads of Spain: friars and galley slaves, mocking dukes, penances of love in the Sierra Morena, a peasant girl whom Sancho passes off as an enchanted princess. Cervantes slips into his own story as a character, lets a manuscript break off in the middle of a duel, argues over who the true author is. The humor never leaves the page, but beneath it runs a tenderness toward this madman who wants the world to be nobler than it is.

Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts the heavens ever bestowed upon men, says Don Quixote, and lines like this surface amid the laughter as if by chance. Four centuries on, the question this book poses remains open: how much we ought to dream, and at what price.