More DQ

[Ghetta Life]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/12/23/DDGG53RCCU1.DTL

Between 1605 and 1615, Miguel de Cervantes wrote what a new translator's 
introduction calls the first modern novel, "Don Quixote" -- and some say 
it's been downhill ever since. Count among that number America's unelected 
literary critic in chief, Harold Bloom, who says in his introduction that 
"no writer since has matched (Cervantes and Shakespeare), not Tolstoi or 
Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce."

As the formidable Don himself, a man forever spoiling for a good fight, 
might say: Prove it. All this hyperbole surrounding what is inarguably one 
of literature's greatest and most influential novels does it no favors, and 
may even help obscure some of its signal virtues. A fresh reading of "Don 
Quixote" discloses not some unimpeachable masterwork on a plinth, but a 
joyous, shaggy, shambling mammoth.

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