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I don't really have a favorite book, unless it's Shakespeare's All or Homer's Both. I might confess to looking into A. E. Housman very often indeed and into the poetry of G. M. Hopkins continually, but then these are not my Desert Island books, being too short and in some ways too limited to provide sufficient company for any long period of time. So let me fib a little and say that Don Quixote is my favorite. The fact that it is not only points out that I am unable to choose only one. I reread Cervantes' great novel this summer past and realized that I was reading it, in my sixty-sixth year, for what would probably be the last time. This realization added a certain plangency to an experience that has always been - for some ten years earlier readings, perhaps - exhilarating, hilarious, melancholy, and redolent. I wish I had Spanish and that I had visited the La Mancha landscape in Spain, but opportunities to learn either of these has been denied me. But I have learned that one must read for English translation that of Urquhart and that one must read a little into the history and geography of Spain to appreciate the book just a little more deeply. But even those preparations are unnecessary. The book opens with a satire on books; it broadens out to extend into the picaresque romance; it gives us two of the most lifelike yet fantastic character portraits in all literature; it delineates the divided human consciousness with wit and humor and fondness; it is High Adventure, Funny Lowjinks, and Deep Philosophy. It meanders like the river whose banks it traces, introducing bewildered and frantic ill-starred lovers, little novels with happy endings, lugubrious animals, antic aristocrats, and shepherds both lovesick and bellicose. In short, it has everything except readers. That is because it is a long book, digressive, set in a remote place, and with a historical background somewhat unfamiliar to American audiences. But that only makes it all the more endearing. To sit by a lamp at midnight, with a moderate glass of Madeira at hand, and to think that one might be the only person in our land just now enjoying a pleasure that centuries commend and that only a few still partake of. Unique!

Reviewed by Fred C., Author

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