Monsignor Quixote

by Graham Greene, John Auchard (Introduction)

Overview

When Father Quixote, a local priest of the Spanish village of El Toboso who claims ancestry to Cervantes’ fictional Don Quixote, is elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, he sets out on a journey to Madrid to purchase purple socks appropriate to his new station. Accompanying him on his mission is his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village who argues politics and religion with Quixote and rescues him from the various troubles his innocence lands him in along the way. Published in 1932, Monsignor Quixote is Graham Greene’s last religious novel, a fond homage to Cervantes, and a sincere exploration into the meaning of faith in the modern world. This edition features a new introduction by John Auchard.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143105527
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/30/2008
Series:	Penguin Classics Series
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	391,085
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose long life nearly spanned the length of the twentieth century, was one of its greatest novelists. Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, he started his career as a sub-editor of The Times of London. He began to attract notice as a novelist with his fourth book, Orient Express, in 1932. In 1935, he trekked across northern Liberia, his first experience in Africa, recounted in A Journey Without Maps (1936). He converted to Catholicism in 1926, an edifying decision, and reported on religious persecution in Mexico in 1938 in The Lawless Roads, which served as a background for his famous The Power and the Glory, one of several “Catholic” novels (Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair). During the war he worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone; afterward, he began wide-ranging travels as a journalist, which were reflected in novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, and The Captain and the Enemy. In addition to his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, two books of autobiography—A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape—two biographies, and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays and film and book reviews to The Spectator and other journals, many of which appear in the late collection Reflections. Most of his novels have been filmed, including The Third Man, which the author first wrote as a film treatment. Graham Greene was named Companion of Honour and received the Order of Merit among numerous other awards.

John Auchard is a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, and the editor of The Portable Henry James.

Date of Birth:

October 2, 1904

Date of Death:

April 3, 1991

Place of Birth:

Berkhamsted, England

Place of Death:

Vevey, Switzerland

Education:

Balliol College, Oxford

Editorial Reviews

Monsignor Quixote, is not so much a novel as a whimsical meditation on faith and doubt and the varieties of human folly - a meditation with plenty of illustrations. As such it is often charming, bemusing rather than provocative, leisurely rather than energetic, at times even a bit slack. More than any work of Greene's that I have read, it is suffused with nostalgia for the pre-industrial, pre-bourgeois world, a world of face-to-face encounters between man and God, man and man, man and beast. Greene celebrates a world of simple appetites that can be directly satisfied when two contentious friends sit down to cheese, sausage, wine and talk. Monsignor Quixote, mildly invites - rather than compels -the reader to share this humble feast.
— New York Times

Robert Towers