Surely, judging a book written 400 years ago in line with modern standards of narrative and storytelling amounts to unforgivable sacrilege and infant-level ignorance, especially since the book under discussion is solely responsible for introducing most of those standards.

Yet, when the Norwegian Nobel Institute polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature” (Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, and many others were among the authors polled), the editors revealed that Don Quixote received 50 percent more votes than any other book ever written.

And most polls and inquiries held around the world in the last hundred years reveal that Miguel de Cervantes’ tale continues to receive the majority of votes, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer, and Tolstoy. After the Bible, there has hardly been any book that has been more influential and important over a period of four centuries, giving birth to more than 30 film adaptations and countless plays, novels, and other works of art.

Having said that, let’s nonetheless pretend that this is another hyped Netflix show and that we have to grasp the reason why it has become so popular. This allows us to ruthlessly chop this magical masterpiece into constituent parts – if we were to express our findings in very primitive, tag-like terms, words like groundbreaking, universal, and humane would almost certainly pop up.

Read the entire article here: Hollywood Insider