Don Quixote de La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (29 CDs)

Don Quixote de La Mancha
by Miguel de Cervantes, read by Robert Whitfield (Unabridged)

Translated by Tobias Smollett

With a wealth of fancy and an irrepressible high spirit, this beloved adventure story pokes fun at the exaggerated social and literary conventions of Cervantes’ day. Driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, Don Quixote decks himself out in rusty armor and a cardboard helmet, determined to become a knight-errant and roam the world righting wrongs. He persuades the practical Sancho Panza to become his squire, and his inspiration on his quest is the peasant girl Aldonza, whom he idealizes as his queen of love and beauty, Dulcinea. From his first fighting encounter with a score of windmills to his climactic confrontation with a victorious enemy, Don Quixote’s feeble mind and heroic heart have earned him a place as one of the best-loved characters in fiction.

This audio book presentation includes the complete text of Tobias Smollett's acclaimed translation of Don Quixote. As Salman Rushdie declared, "To my mind, this is the only English rendering of the Quixote that reads like a great novel, a novel of immense daring, much wildness and many colours. It releases Don Quixote from the grey academic prison of many more recent translations, unleashing him upon the English language in all his brilliant, foolish glory".

Reviews

“Don Quixote, famously, is the first major work of Western literature to take ordinary human life for its subject—specifically, a life that is replete with accidents, fiascoes, and indignities—and make it over into something luminous with meaning. It does so without pomp or sententiousness—it's the friendliest and least formal of all the Great Books—yet will overwhelm you, in the end, with its moral and imaginative splendor."—Atlantic Monthly

About the Author

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), novelist, playwright, and poet, was born in Spain of an ancient but impoverished family. After studying in Madrid, he became a soldier and was wounded in battle. He was taken by pirates in 1575, put in prison at Algiers, and was ransomed five years later. He spent the remainder of his life struggling to earn a livelihood from literature and humble government employment. His first attempt at fiction was a pastoral novel, La Galatea (1585), which was followed by his masterpiece, The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605).

About The Narrator

Narrator Robert Whitfield, real name Simon Vance, was born in 1955 in Brighton, Sussex, England. Vance caught the acting bug whilst attending Brighton School of Music and Drama on Saturday mornings. He began his career at the BBC in 1976 during summer break, at Radio Brighton whilst studying at Leeds University. In 1984 he moved to London where he spent the rest of the decade as a newsreader and presenter for BBC Radio 4. He discovered his knack for narrating audiobooks when working at the Talking Book Service of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Vance moved to California, USA in the 1990's and started recording audiobooks professionally. He has won seven 'Earphone' awards from AudioFile Magazine, three consecutive 'Audie' nominations and three in 2006 from the Audio Publishers Association.