The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent shape, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
From the dust jacket:
"A certain strong man," says Carlyle, "fought stoutly at Lepanto, worked stoutly as an Algerine slave; with stout cheerfulness endured famine and nakedness and the world's ingratitude; and sitting in gaol, with one hand left him, wrote our joyfullest, and all but our deepest, modern book, and named it Don Quixote."
That is almost all we know for fact about the man called Cervantes. Yet his book has been read by millions down the centuries, and men today in their everyday speech use the name of his chief character without remembering its origin. Bruno Frank's task has been to catch the man's essential spirit. No material could have been better suited to his gifted and subtle pen. His scene is Spain at the time of the Armada, with its lavish court and beggarly populace, its crafty and mysterious king. His penniless hero goes to Rome in the retinue of a Papal legate; he fights the Turks at the bloody sea-battle of Lepanto; he is captured by Barbary pirates and spends many years their prisoner, conniving wild and abortive escapes; he returns a beggar to his native land and haunts the courts and playhouses; he has drab love-affairs while dreaming romances; and he finally sits down, a prisoner, to write his immortal book. We see him in the end, a little like his hero, with "that noble and fantastic head of his among the stars," reading of battles with windmills and acts of quixotic chivalry to an enraptured audience of pickpockets and cutthroats, his fellow-prisoners.
Bruno Frank has given us in Cervantes a lovable and human character against the crazy tapestry of an age of magnificent contrasts. It is a book which should reach out far beyond the small but enthusiastic group of Frank's admirers in America.
Did you find this review helpful?