Reading Order
Monsignor QuixoteGraham Greene Monsignor Quixote Reading Order
Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote (1982) is his most overtly Cervantine novel — the story of Father Quixote, the gentle priest of the Spanish village of El Toboso who claims descent from Don Quixote, and his Communist mayor Sancho, who travel through Spain together in a second-hand SEAT 600 called Rocinante. The novel is organized as a comic Cervantine dialogue between faith and materialism, between the absurdity of belief and the absurdity of unbelief, and it is Greene's most loving and most personal late statement of the themes he had explored throughout his Catholic fiction.
Where to start
The Power and the Glory
Complete Monsignor Quixote Book List
- 1Buy
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene·1940·The essential companion — the Catholic novel that establishes the theological tradition Monsignor Quixote inhabits; the contrast between the whisky priest's terrible fight for faith and Father Quixote's gentle, bemused faith gives the full range of Greene's Catholic priests. - 2Buy
Monsignor Quixote
Graham Greene·1982·The novel itself — Father Quixote, Mayor Sancho, Rocinante, and the journey through Franco's and post-Franco's Spain. - 3Buy
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes·1605·The essential predecessor — Cervantes's knight of the sad countenance and his squire Sancho Panza; reading the relevant sections of Don Quixote before Monsignor Quixote makes the allusions and departures fully legible; not required but highly rewarding. - 4Buy
A Burnt-Out Case
Graham Greene·1960·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. - 5Buy
The Priest
Graham Greene·1982·The non-fiction collection — Greene's reflections on Catholicism gathered from various writings; the direct non-fiction companion to Monsignor Quixote in understanding what Greene believed and doubted in his faith at the time of writing. - 6Buy
Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis·1946·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 an earthy-philosophical companion pairing; both are organized around the dialogue between a man of practical materialism and a man of spiritual idealism. - 7Buy
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco·1980·Eco's medieval mystery novel about William of Baskerville's investigation at a monastery — 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.
Monsignor Quixote — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Monsignor Quixote about?
Monsignor Quixote follows Father Quixote, the gentle priest of the Spanish village of El Toboso who claims descent from Don Quixote, who sets off with the Communist mayor Sancho on a road trip through Spain in his old SEAT 600 (called Rocinante). The novel is a Cervantine comic dialogue between faith and materialism, organized around the improbable friendship between a believer and a Communist.
Is Monsignor Quixote based on Don Quixote?
Yes — Monsignor Quixote is an explicit homage to Cervantes, with Father Quixote claiming literal descent from Don Quixote, his car named Rocinante, and his Communist companion Sancho echoing Don Quixote's squire. Greene uses the Cervantine framework to explore the relationship between faith and doubt, between the absurdity of religious belief and the absurdity of Marxist materialism.
Is Monsignor Quixote a good last Graham Greene novel to read?
Monsignor Quixote is best read after Greene's major Catholic novels — The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair — when you have the full context for his theological concerns. As a last novel, it functions as a loving and relatively peaceful farewell to the questions he had been wrestling with for fifty years, and the Cervantine framework gives it a warmth that is unusual in Greene's work.
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