Tilting at Windmills: A Novel of Cervantes and the Errant Knight Book

This is an inventive and well-written homage to that pillar of Western literature, "Don Quixote." Julian Branston's premise is that the famous knight errant actually exists. He has great fun with the political implications of poetry in seventeenth-century Spain, and the story takes on shades of "Amadeus" when he makes a Cervantian rival the villain of the plot.

I looked in vain for the "foul-mouthed Iberian babes" singled out by a reviewer from Britain's Guardian newspaper. While a pair of beautiful Spanish women do have prominent roles in the story (as the widowed patroness of a literary salon and the wife of Cervantes' friend and printer Robles, respectively), neither of them seems particularly foul-mouthed.

Don Quixote come to life has all of the serenity and comic detachment you'd expect (think Peter Sellers in the movie "Being There"), but my favorite character is Branston's update of Sancho Panza in the person of a merchant named Pedro.

Pedro is loyal as a dog, always looking to make a peso, and prone to generalities about the import/export business if you insist on asking what he does for a living.