Don Quixote is one of those books whose influence is so far-reaching as to be almost ubiquitous, like The Odyssey, or the Bible. And like the Bible or Homer’s epic, it is more often talked about than read. Yet what distinguishes Cervantes’s novel from these works is the fact that it is a decidedly low affair. It lumbers along: Its characters fall off horses, get drunk in taverns, and try to hold in their farts—in Don Quixote, sacred matters are usually confined to the delusions of its hero. Its famous opening sentence informs us that “somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and an ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing”—clearly, we are very far from Ithaca or Bethlehem.

And yet the novel is a pillar of the canon. As the translator and literary scholar Ilan Stavans tells us in his new book, Quixote: The Novel and the World (W.W. Norton, 2015), only the Bible has been translated into English more often. There are seven ballets based on it, an asteroid named after it, and a video game inspired by it. I have even heard it told, by a professor who once taught a class on Don Quixote, that there is a sixties-era Danish porn adaptation out there somewhere. (It’s a rumor so outlandish that, Quixote-style, I had no choice but to instantly believe it.)

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Second Part of Don Quixote—or, as Stavans determinedly calls it, El Quijote—and makes for a suitable occasion to examine why this odd, monotonous, funny, cruel, and strangely affecting novel has provoked so many disparate reactions over the centuries. Stavans, who claims to have spent his entire adult life wanting to be Don Quixote, proves an affable guide steeped in Quixotalia. His library, he tells us, aside from being littered with Quixote-inspired lunchboxes, action figures, postal stamps and advertisements, is jammed with translations of the novel in Yiddish, Korean, Quechua, and even Klingon.

The first half of Stavans’s Quixote helpfully digests much of the context of Cervantes’s world—Golden Age Spain, with its dwindling empire and bumbling, paranoid monarchs—and explores the enigmatic life of Don Quixote’s author. Stavans asks, a little verbosely, to what extent it is “accurate to visualize Cervantes through a Caucasian prism.” (A more straightforward way of putting this might have been, “Is it true that Cervantes was simply white?”) It has long been speculated that Cervantes may have been partly Jewish, while his decision to frame Don Quixote as a translation from the Arabic—the “first author” of the book is the fictional Arab historian Cide Hemete Benengeli—is suggestive of what Stavans calls an “intense interest in things Muslim.” What’s more, Spain in the late sixteenth century was something of melting pot of ethnicity and culture, and Cervantes’s travels in Italy, his frequent brushes with the law, and the five years he spent as a slave of Turkish pirates in Algeria, lends his status within the Catholic Spanish Empire a renegade luster.

I have even heard it told, by a professor who once taught a class on Don Quixote, that there is a sixties-era Danish porn adaptation out there somewhere.

But Stavans is mostly silent on the question of religion in Don Quixote, which is surprising given Cervantes’s supposed interest in Muslim culture and the novel’s many blasphemous barbs. And though Stavans is an admirably obsessive reader—in the mold of José Martínez Ruiz, who in 1905 published La ruta de don Quijote, a work of literary cartography in which the Spanish critic attempted to trace Don Quixote’s journey using the geographically inexact locations mentioned in the novel—literary obsession is not always consistent with cloudless literary judgment, and literary judgment is precisely what Stavans lacks.