Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
My rating: 3/5 cats
done quixote!!!
pun quixote!!
fun quixote??
none quixote…
and that’s not entirely true; there are some rollicking good times in here, but the first part is so much endlessly episodic violence, and while the second half becomes calmer and more focused, it never got my imagination engaged nor my blood flowing.
in fact, although i know he really does love it, i can’t help but feel that brian’s recommending this to me is similar to the duke and duchess having their fun with don q. i feel like brian is pulling a prank on me – that he does not want me to meet my reading goal and is laughingly crowing, “no, karen, you will not read 150 books this year!! i am preventing you!!”
i will show you. despite the amount of time i was stalled on this one, i will come right back in the game.
but this, i did not love this. and a lot of it is just context. i can appreciate it as an artifact and as a foundation for western literature, but it suffers from the fate of any work that was not edited professionally.
tastes change over time. just in the same way that marilyn monroe would have probably had to drop fifteen pounds to rock our modern-day underfed runway ideal, so this book could lose a similar amount of text. stop frothing, bri, seriously if this turned up in some slush pile somewhere, there would be allll kinds of criticism, and it might even get passed around the office (lgm) a few times to the giggles of the editorial assistants: “this guy can’t even keep the supporting character’s wife’s name straight!!”, “this is inconsistent!!”,” “this is repetitive!””what is this interlude that has nothing to do with anything else doing in here??” “this is flat-out stolen from another source!!!”
an editor would go to town on this puppy.
but we have the luxury of reading this 500 years after it was written and marveling at how fresh and modern it still sounds. and part of it is very modern. but grossman’s frequent “cervantes probably meant ____here” or “this is the wrong reference” would not play in a modern novel. if jonathan safran foer had done this, there would be a crown of pretentious classics majors drawling, “i can’t believe he said “perseus” when he meant “theseus”…” guffaw guffaw.
but 500 years down the road, we can afford to be more forgiving. vanity press authors take heart!
and i am aware i am being nitpicky, i am more just interested in pointing out how a lot of people who love this book would be very indignant to read something produced today that had so many obvious flaws.
but i do admire longevity.
i just couldn’t get into it, overall. there are a lot of great moments here: the burning of the books (nooo!), the puppet show, don q. in a cage, and great non-action sequences in the discussions of the value of drama as a medium and the difficulty of translation and many other minor occurrences.
the first half is just episode after episode of this delusional thug with some kind of ‘roid-rage, meth-aggression attacking people and innocent lions, unprovoked, and his sidekick who is a grasping fiend who would sell you out for even the promise of a sandwich. and it all reads like marx brothers slapsticky stuff. i mean, how do you break someone’s nose with a loaf of bread??
with the second half, it is better and becomes more self-reflexive and much sadder, but a lot of it still remains tedious. the second half, written ten years after the first part, frequently references the unauthorized sequel to don q that some guy wrote and pissed cervantes off. it is like a mean girl passing notes to the cool kids, “did you hear what he said??? that’s my man he’s messing with!!” etc etc.
and i am not a lazy reader, even though my tastes tend toward a faster pace than this, but i have read plenty of slow-paced, dense prose that didn’t make me take out my mental red pen and slash away at what i felt was extraneous or repetitious.
i can appreciate the message about art and its impact and its potential and its place in the world, but i did not have fun reading this book.
and i make no apologies.
and for jasmine – who doesn’t think there is anything complicated or pretentious in the spanish language – this qualifies, i think. it gets all meta in the second act. for its time, it was seriously mind-bending stuff.
