Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
The Hunter
By Tim Parks
Vertigo
by W.G. Sebald, Translated from the German by Michael Hulse
New Directions, 263 pp., $23.95
In the closing pages of Cervantes's masterpiece, at last disabused and disillusioned, a decrepit Don Quixote finds that there is nothing for him beyond folly but death. When giants are only windmills and Dulcinea a stout peasant lass who has no time for a knight errant, life, alas, is unlivable. 'Truly he is dying,' says the priest who takes his confession, 'and truly he is sane.' Sancho Panza breaks down in tears: 'Oh don't die, dear master!… Take my advice and live many years. For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy.'
Review, 4318 words
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