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The Enamoured Knight

by Douglas Glover

Douglas Glover’s extended meditation on Don Quixote, The Enamoured Knight, is simply packed to the brim with marvellous stuff. Not only does he lovingly and with great thoughtfulness delve into the richness of Cervantes’ masterwork, which is celebrating its 400th birthday this year, but he takes readers on a wonderful tour of critical perspectives on Don Quixote.

Glover also appraises the form of the novel itself, with a little help from Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Milan Kundera, and Northrop Frye, amongst others. He then studies the nature of Cervantes’ brilliant uses of humour (with great humour himself, finding seven types including verbal dialogic, reverse-trend, situational, slapstick, Rabelaisian, and parodic), ponders the question of what it means to be a reader and how readers interact with written texts, and contemplates the effects Don Quixote has had on world literature.

Glover approaches his subject with such care, investigating the book’s complex Chinese box structure, and the development of the character of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. He finds interesting parallels between the novel and Alice Munro’s short story “Meneseteung,” as well as other novels as diverse as Mansfield Park, Heart of Darkness, Anna Karenina, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Accidental Tourist.

In doing so, Glover asks us to ask ourselves questions about how we read Don Quixote and why. Is this a work of comic genius? Is it about the defeat of fantasy by realism or the human spirit persevering in the face of harsh reality? What is most satisfying about The Enamoured Knight is its ability to convey Glover’s utter fascination for Don Quixote. His love for the novel comes across with a freshness and liveliness that makes for riveting reading.

 

Reviewer: Jeffrey Canton

Publisher: Oberon Press

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 190 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-7780-1249-2

Released: Dec.

Issue Date: 2005-2

Categories: Criticism & Essays