Entertaining, funny, bawdy, inventive, comic, ironic...this is one fantastic piece of literature. It stoops occasionally towards slapstick and toilet humor, but other than that it is sheer genius. Cervantes was inventing the modern novel as he went along. All the forms the modern reader is used to are here. Cervantes never forgets that his job is to entertain, and he skips around, narrating as the author, the editor, anyone and any point of view he needs. It's post-modern! He openly refers to his contemporaries, his rivals, his readers, society at large. He will stop the story dead in order to have one of the characters launch into a side-story. The language is poetic, and it is amazing and enlightening to learn that people 400 years ago were calling each other "blockhead," for example. Go read this masterpiece!