The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES CERVANTES, in relation to the Spanish language, stands with the titans of European and American literature. He is what Shakespeare is to English, Dante to Italian, Goethe to German, Pushkin to Russian: the glory of the vernacular. There may be no single eminence in French: Rabelais, Racine, Molière, Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Paul Valéry are among writers of the first order. In Russian, Tolstoy alone challenges Pushkin.

The Desert Island Question ("If just one book, which? ") has no universal answer, but many readers would choose among three: the King James Bible, the complete Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Is it an oddity that the three competitors were almost simultaneous? The King James Bible appeared in 1611, six years after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, in 1605 (the second part came a decade later, in 1615). In 1605, Shakespeare matched the greatness of Cervantes's masterwork with King Lear, and then went on rapidly to Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.