Recommendations
Books Like Monsignor Quixote
Best books to read after Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene
Monsignor Quixote is Greene's most loving and most Cervantine novel — Father Quixote and Mayor Sancho's road trip through Spain as a comic dialogue between faith and materialism. If the novel's warmth and its portrait of an improbable friendship between a believer and a Communist moved you, these books share its concern with the comedy of belief, its Cervantine dialogue structure, and its conviction that the most human relationships cross the boundaries that ideology would keep sealed.
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
The essential companion — the Catholic novel that establishes the theological context Monsignor Quixote inhabits; the contrast between the whisky priest's terrible fight for faith and Father Quixote's gentle, bemused faith gives the two poles of Greene's Catholic priests; essential reading to understand what Monsignor Quixote is a loving late statement of
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Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The essential predecessor — Cervantes's knight of the sad countenance and his squire Sancho Panza; Monsignor Quixote is an explicit homage, with Father Quixote claiming literal descent from Don Quixote and his car named Rocinante; reading the relevant sections of Don Quixote before Monsignor Quixote makes the allusions fully legible
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A Burnt-Out Case
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's late Catholic fiction — Querry's exhausted absence of faith; the contrast between Querry's spiritual emptiness and Father Quixote's gentle faith gives the two poles of Greene's late Catholic vision; reading Monsignor Quixote after A Burnt-Out Case shows how Greene arrived at something approaching peace
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Zorba the Greek
by Nikos Kazantzakis
Kazantzakis's novel about a Greek peasant philosopher and the intellectual narrator who travels with him — the most direct parallel to Monsignor Quixote's structure of a companion pairing organized as a dialogue between practical materialism and spiritual idealism
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Eco's medieval mystery novel — the companion in the tradition of the comic-serious Catholic novel published at the same time; both appeared in the early 1980s and are organized around the relationship between faith, reason, and the comic perspective that makes both bearable
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's road novel about Stevens the butler's journey through England, reconstructing his past — the most important parallel to Monsignor Quixote's structure of a journey through a changing landscape organized around the reconstruction of what one has believed; both are fundamentally about loyalty to values that the world no longer recognizes
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Travels with My Aunt
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's late comedy — Henry Pulling and Aunt Augusta's picaresque journey; the contrast between the grave comedy of Monsignor Quixote (organized around faith and death) and the playful comedy of Travels with My Aunt shows the range of Greene's comic possibilities in his late career
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Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's most reflexively metafictional novel — the comparison with Monsignor Quixote's Cervantine self-consciousness shows the range of the comic novel's capacity for philosophical depth; both use comedy as a way of engaging with questions that would be unbearable if approached directly
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