When people say “Don Quixote” is the first modern novel, the reason is experimental, self-referential, reality-blurring stuff like this. It put me in mind of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail ...

Gender, race, class, colonialism and “unorthodox forms of desire” are among the still-relevant cultural issues at play in “Don Quixote,” Cartagena noted, but the novel is also very funny.

The novel tells the story of an aging Spanish gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who becomes obsessed with chivalry books and decides to reinvent himself as a knight-errant, taking the name Don Quixote.

A painting of Don Quixote, the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s novel, and his companion Sancho Panza, by French painter Honore Daumier from the late 19th century.