Don Quixote
The first modern novel, published in 1605, and still the most influential work of fiction ever written. Cervantes invented the self-aware narrator, the unreliable protagonist, and fiction that comments on its own fictionality. Every novelist since has been working in his shadow. Bloom placed it at the center of Western literature, second only to Shakespeare.
Nine hundred pages, and Part One keeps stopping dead for interpolated novellas; Cervantes himself apologized for them in the sequel. The joke runs on repetition: Quixote charges, Quixote gets beaten, Sancho comments. By the Duke and Duchess episodes the comedy has curdled into aristocrats tormenting a sick old man for sport. The founding document of the modern novel needed an editor.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
