Quixote at 400

Leopoldo writes that "Spain is all frantic with the 400 years. Lots of new editions - at very reasonable prices - of Don Quixote with excellent footnotes and commentaries," and cites a recent IHT article by C.J. Moore about the author and the anniversary:

Here is the other face of the modern world as we know it. Following the new humanism of Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes brings up the complex issues arising from self-consciousness, the dimension of irony, even self-deprecation. In the person of Don Quixote himself, this self-consciousness shows as melancholy, the mood in which the ingenioso hidalgo approaches his end.

Yet Cervantes rescues us from a potential and terrible pit of cynicism through finding his characters' redemption as individuals. Neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza is truly mad, but they are human, noble, absurd, caring, confused, often mistaken, like ourselves, in a real world governed by the facts of life. This year we celebrate the 400th anniversary of that literary redemption of humanity.