Don Quixote (Penguin Classics S.)
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
|
|
| published
|
2001
by Penguin Books Ltd
|
| first published
| 1605 |
| binding
| Paperback |
| isbn
|
0140445617
(isbn13: 9780140445619)
|
| ebook |
|
| pages
| 1056 |
| date added
|
03-27-07
|
|
Sign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of Don Quixote.
discuss this book
groups with this book
English 93
58 members
last activity: 04/27/2008 03:41PM
location: San Francisco, CA
AKINS - REFORMA
32 members
last activity: 15 days ago, 10:26PM
location: Austin, TX
BISAR
26 members
last activity: 07/19/2008 07:01PM
friend reviews (0)
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
other reviews
(showing 1-20 of 6349)
Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in March, 2008
recommended to John by:
Ted Hoagland
recommends it for:
Classics readers, knights-fiction readers
In short: it's a frickin' classic of world literature. Read it.
In slightly longer, but still short: an amusing an infamous first fifty pages with lots of hit-or-miss after that. The second half gets dreadfully stale, but has an interesting ending from a literary analytical standpoint.
In long: I'm using this review space as a journal of reading the incredible mountain of pages.
Day 1: Here goes nothing. Here come 1,000 pages of translated text.
The opening was insufferably cheeky, a...more
In short: it's a frickin' classic of world literature. Read it.
In slightly longer, but still short: an amusing an infamous first fifty pages with lots of hit-or-miss after that. The second half gets dreadfully stale, but has an interesting ending from a literary analytical standpoint.
In long: I'm using this review space as a journal of reading the incredible mountain of pages.
Day 1: Here goes nothing. Here come 1,000 pages of translated text.
The opening was insufferably cheeky, and the origins of Quixote are slower to unravel than a heroic anime. Still, I see promise here, and my, if the reputation doesn't earn it a couple of hundred pages before I pass a strong judgment.
Day 2: Just finished chapter two. Couldn't help but notice the dope wearing ill-fitting armor, his sidekick riding an ass, and the party attacking wind mills all occurred within the first two chapters. That about sums up the culturally famous parts of the novel, making me wonder how many people in human history made it to page 50.
Day 3: Passing through Book 3, Quixote is really growing on me despite Cervantes's narrative. Cervantes comes across as very bitterly and far less clever in his very, very frequent literary and cultural criticisms, making Quixote's naive and insane positivity downright refreshing. I'll be interested to see if Cervantes does anything with this, but he's got me sympathizing with, and heck, downright rooting for the irresponsible, senile knight.
Day 6: I'm told Cervantes took up the hyper-critical narrator to make a second point - beyond satirizing chivalry and parodying chivalric literature, he wants me to sympathize with Quixote. That is a deep and admirable goal, though I'm too thick-headed to have realized it on my own. It would have been particularly hard to realize without help because the caustic nature of the narrative goes dormant so often, and has been almost completely absent for fifty pages.
Though it's at least part because of my modern bias, the bigoted references to Africans and Islam are bothering me.
This book is quickly feeling like a classical prose anime. Many of the chapters are completely unrelated and feel like filler episodes, the main chapters are highly episodic, most everything centers around a cast dealing with an interesting titular character, and the cast is even growing the way anime introduce characters. If it wasn't for Cervantes's sense of humor being so similar to (if more polite than) Geoffrey Chaucer's, and the stuffyness of the writing, I'd sooner put this one the anime DVD shelf than the classic book shelf.
Day 7: Climbed through all of "The Impertinent Curiosity" today, a three-chapter digression that told another "novel" all on its own. Perhaps it's in part due to the translation, but this is insufferably overwritten, with so much needless language and euphemism that I couldn't tell if Cervantes intended homosexual innuendo in the first chapter, or when characters were supposed to have erotic or romantic attraction half the time in the rest. Despite that, it is a great argument against picking apart the things you love ('lest you aren't able to put them back together).
Day 11: I'm deep into Book 2. The dialogue is sharper (though still very dated), a lot of the cleverness is executed more subtly, and Sancho (that's the sidekick) and Quixote seem to actually expand as characters. No, they don't grow or change, or dimensions are finally coming out of them - nice to read, over 600 pages in. Quixote is finally exiting that insufferable phase of senility where everything he does is stupid and the characters or narrator remind us of it, and is now actually getting things right now and then, suggesting he must be more complex than the fool Cervantes often drew him to be. He recognizes good poetry (even though the narrator disagrees with his judgment), is able to discuss philosophy with sound judgment, and actually stands up to defend a case of real but forbidden love, rather than a delusion of two cucumbers that he thinks are lovers. This makes him much more interpretable and interesting, just as the stories in the picaresque are becoming more interesting, as deception is used for more amiable ends than selfishness, pride or greed. Deception is quickly replacing mistakes as the main theme of this tome.
Oh, and the introduction to Book 2 is interesting as it stands as a 400-year-old example of metafiction, with the characters discussing events of publication, the real-life forged "sequel" to the original book, and Cervantes' work. It also stands out as a 400-year-old example of metafiction being insufferably cheeky. How much the ancients predicted...
Day 15: The apocryphal chapter was tremendous. Don Quixote visiting a holy site, descending into it beyond anyone's line of sight, and falling asleep. Not getting knocked out, not passing unconscious, but Cervantes specifically says he is asleep. Then he returns with a story of rich visions no one could improvise, leaving us to wonder if he is lying, if his delusion deepened in the cave, or if Quixote, who has been developing to show more real intelligence lately, really saw some of this. Cervantes is so preoccupied with slamming Quixote that it's easy to dismiss the possibility that Quixote really experienced some of this, but I think that's the easy way out. Hell, even if Cervantes did mean to make this the thousandth skeptical joke at Quixote's expense, I think I'd interpret it the other way just to give the text some depth.
The prophetic ape was also amusing, but after that the novel has spiraled down into the worst streak of thinly-veiled criticism. Sancho's bitching is insufferable. The meeting with another knight's party was similarly cloying. All the cleverness is gone. At this stage in the game, did we really need Sancho to give us yet another monologue on how dumb his master is? This better be a trick setting up some further development of Quixote as semi-reliable or some other twist.
Day 22: I went out of town for a week and decided to leave this at home. I took some shorter books with me instead. Couldn't put up with the awful redundancy and unhumorous comedy during what was supposed to be a vacation. After a week-long breather I find Cervantes's Book 2 almost unbearable. It seems that every new situation is quirky or curious in some way that feels not novel in the least after several hundred pages of other quirky and curious conflicts, and the stories consist mostly of characters talking about how weird or difficult some part of them are. In all the years I've had professors and writers praise this book to me I've never heard them mention any of this material, leaving me to guess that even they never really finished this thing. Sancho as a governor has a nice inverted-Solomon quality about it when he's actually acting, but even most of his deliberations are considerably subpar satire for Cervantes. The highlight of today's reading was Quixote's letter of advice, and that only for the rare extremely quotable and thought-provoking lines, such as "Be thou a father to the virtuous, and a stepfather to the wicked," rather than their (self-defeating) context.
Day 24: Rounding the final stretch of the book, Sancho and Quixote are somehow back out on the road together again, running into people who are alternately impressed or cynical towards Quixote's wackiness. They complain about the fake second book again. Quixote defends some woman's honor through zany romanticism again. Was Cervantes paid by the page? The highlight (by far) is Quixote's criticism of various saints, going from bold to absurd. The lowlight is the talking bust that, *shockingly,* is a fake.
Day 26: Finally done. Cervantes really bore a grudge against the guy who wrote the fake Quixote sequel, but his last riffs against him (won't spoil them) was by far the funniest. I imagine the last twenty pages are cause for more college essays than the preceeding 980, but especially having read so much history and taking so much pains to learn how to earn an ending in fiction, this came off entirely as a half-hearted cop-out that Cervantes didn't mean to be the final word (figuratively, though obviously it is literally). He's suddenly sane, renounces everything he did and becomes bitter? There's a good reason his company "had no doubt whatever that some new craze had taken possession of him."...less
bookshelves:
literature
Read in July, 2008
On the translation:
From flipping through a few, I decided the Edith Grossman version was the best despite lack of notes. Not archaic but not too modern either. She describes it as a combination between a 19th century European novel and William Faulkner. Why not?
On the novel:
What sort of 'idealism' is satirized in Don Quixote? This is the standard reading of what the book's 'point' is, as the inaugural text of a tradition -- the modern novel -- whose raison d'etre is s...more
On the translation:
From flipping through a few, I decided the Edith Grossman version was the best despite lack of notes. Not archaic but not too modern either. She describes it as a combination between a 19th century European novel and William Faulkner. Why not?
On the novel:
What sort of 'idealism' is satirized in Don Quixote? This is the standard reading of what the book's 'point' is, as the inaugural text of a tradition -- the modern novel -- whose raison d'etre is self-reflexive confrontation with reality, ironically highlighting the power of fantasy to bring on a special form of madness.
But the word idealism has too many definitions. If taken to imply hope for a better world, then I think this is actually foreclosed by Quixote the idle country gentleman's desire to resurrect and embody a set of purely literary chivalric ideals. Quixote's is a bookish idealism. The dozens of little jokes to the reader about the historical accuracy of the novel, 'originally' written by Cide Hamete and translated, commented on, and perhaps altered by others, (including but not limited to Cervantes), allude to the inherent unreliability of texts of all kinds, not just romances. The scene in Chapter 39 of part 1 where Quixote defends himself to a canon by giving a long litany of his influences, an amalgam of real and fictional characters, can only provoke a hesitant, qualified response from his would-be debunker -- Merlin didn't exist, but the Twelve Peers of France did, and they should have been the most honorable of men, though their exploits have certainly been exaggerated, etc. etc. When it comes to recorded history, no one is on absolutely firm ground.
But this doesn't reduce to a sort of radical skepticism in which we have no choice but to give up all attempts make sense out of phenomenon. Cervantes repeatedly refers to the reader's power over the text and obligation to the world, not the other way around. Following Quixote's improbable subterranean visions in the Cave of Montesinos episode, Cervantes writes: "You, reader, since you are a discerning person, must judge it according to your own lights, for I must not and cannot do more" (614).
One of Quixote's faults is that he extends the limitless unreliability of texts to his experience of the real world. This is how he defends his fantasy life:
"'Well, Sancho, by that same oath you swore before, I swear to you,' said Don Quixote, 'that you have the dimmest wits that any squire in the world has or ever had. Is it possible that in all the time you have traveled with me you have not yet noticed that all things having to do with knights errant appear to be chimerical, foolish, senseless, and turned inside-out? And not because they really are, but because hordes of enchanters always walk among us and alter and change everything and turn things into whatever they please, according to whether they wish to favor us or destroy us; and so, what appears to you a barber's basin seems to me the helmet of Mambrino, and will seem another thing to someone else" (195).
Quixote's understanding of the world is based on a preexisting, internally consistent set of laws derived from the countless romances he's read. For him, all stories about the past only refer to each other, not to anything existing beyond them. Whether or not they are verifiable is therefore a moot point. By reconstructing himself as a future literary hero (which his ridiculous adventures eventually bring about, though not in the sense he had anticipated), he insists those same texts can explain his actions better than other possible reasons. My favorite example of this is when he purposefully and without provocation goes mad in the woods in honor of his lady love, a simple peasant woman he's idolized as a beautiful damsel:
"a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason. The great achievement is to lose one's reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?" (194).
As Quixote periodically reminds everyone, unlike a life devoted to religious texts, a follower of chivalric romances has no equivalent for the monk or priest's removal from the world. He's an eloquent advocate of the virtue of action over peaceful contemplation, and does the same for the dominant philosophical and political ideologies of his time, impressing everyone who listens. These, like chivalry, are also bookish ideals, and so are part of Quixote's curious expertise.
But all his practical efforts end in disaster, repeatedly demonstrating to everyone (including, ultimately, himself) how irresponsible, selfish, and crazy his 'idealism' really is. Chivalry by the late 16th/17th centuries had long outlived any practical relationship it might once have had to social life, reflects a fantasy of self-glorification in conflict with everything that exists, good and bad alike. The 'quixotic' (where'd you think that word came from?) force of fictional heroes is expressed in Quixote's famous epitaph:
"Here lies the mighty Gentleman
who rose to such heights of valor
that death itself did not triumph
over his life with his death.
He did not esteem the world;
he was the frightening threat
to the world, in this respect,
for it was his great good fortune
to live a madman, and die sane." (939)
By the end of the novel an end to the many problems of Spain's rapid 'modernization' and the backward nature of its political culture (which takes up much of the story's background) are not to be found, and do not even seem imaginable. But there is one point on which Don Quixote seems to be consistent, that their solutions are not to be copied out from books.
...less
bookshelves:
novel
Read in March, 2006
Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
Until now, I've only read Don Quixote in small doses, reading his battle with the windmills or his mistaking a barber's washbin for the Helmet of Mambrino out of context, either for class or in anthologies. After reading the first book in sequence, I'm ashamed of mysel...more
Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
Until now, I've only read Don Quixote in small doses, reading his battle with the windmills or his mistaking a barber's washbin for the Helmet of Mambrino out of context, either for class or in anthologies. After reading the first book in sequence, I'm ashamed of myself. Grossman's translation certainly adds some accessibility for the the American sensibility, but what struck me most was Cervantes' ironic self-awareness and societal critique, and his playfulness with the novel form that wasn't even technically a form yet. Quixote, whose heroes exist only in his mind at the novel's beginning, eventually meets and argues hilariously with some of them as well as plenty of third parties that stand in disbelief at his lunacy.
It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book review of this book without writing a book myself, so I think I'll just comment randomly:
I laughed and thought hardest when Cervantes brought in the ladies, both real and imagined, to continually check Quixote's romanticization of the female persuasion. His lady Dulcinea of Toboso seems to be a man-like wheat-shocker, but you'd never know it from his visions of her angelic graces. But Quixote seems to be just a worst-case scenario of all the male impulses the other characters display; pretty much all the men objectify women to superhuman levels, and many of the women are either affronted or jilted by the men's fickle imaginations.
I've heard the second book is quite a bit darker and even more self-referential as Quixote waited 10 years between books, and I have agree. Especially in the second book, I wasn’t sure what to think of the "royalty" DQ and Poncho ran into along their merry way. Either the irony was too subtle for my radar, or Cervantes seemed to be in on the arrogant, mean-spirited, sadistic jokes the landed gentry played on the deluded duo. Some of the jokes (the flying horse, for example) were laugh-out-loud funny, but some were just, well, wrong (Altisodora's feigned love for Quixote, practically starving Sancho after giving him his insula governorship). And then some, like the 3000 lashes Sancho had to give his own sweaty buttocks to make Dulcinea pretty again, were both, but mainly because of Sancho's ingenious ways of avoiding delivering the lashes.
The ending really sucked. The episodic nature of the novel I guess prevents any climactic closure, but without giving anything away, Cervantes ends the novel so apologetically that he seems to go ideologically against every previous chapter. I would have stopped reading with ten pages to go if it hadn't been such a long trip to the end.
To my pleasure, the novel was much more violent overall than I expected. If you took out and strung together all the lumps, cuts, bruises, tramplings, beatings, and lashes Quixote and Sancho took it would rival The Passion of the Christ. And be a hundred times more enjoyable.
...less
Read in January, 2008
A classic in every sense of the word.
Called “the Spanish Bible”, the story of the Man from La Mancha (1605) and the Return of the Man from La Mancha (1615) is one of the most famous literary works in the world and rightfully so. Here, the two works are placed in a single volume and, as translated by Edith Grossman, the characters come crazily alive.
In the first book, we are introduced to Alonso Quixano, an intelligent man who spends too much time reading chivalric novels and romantic ta...more
A classic in every sense of the word.
Called “the Spanish Bible”, the story of the Man from La Mancha (1605) and the Return of the Man from La Mancha (1615) is one of the most famous literary works in the world and rightfully so. Here, the two works are placed in a single volume and, as translated by Edith Grossman, the characters come crazily alive.
In the first book, we are introduced to Alonso Quixano, an intelligent man who spends too much time reading chivalric novels and romantic tales. One day, he snaps, believes himself to be Don Quixote, knight errand, and, after talking a neighboring farmer called Sancho Panza into being his squire in return for an island (insula) to govern, leaves his village to seek adventure and to rid the world of evil in the name of his beloved Dulcinea of Toboso, who happens to be some local farm girl that he has built up as this object of impossible beauty.
What follows next are a series of beat downs, misunderstandings, and adventures of a sort. The famous assault on the windmills happens early and from there we are lost in the imagination of Don Quixote and the reality that keeps butting in. As time moves on, and as a commentary on the first book, which was a mad hit, the sequel was made ten years later only to quash the “unauthorized” sequels. The adventures become more adventurous and end in the only real way they can.
What surprised me was how modern it is. The writing style is not out of place today and his use of meta narratives was not only unexpected but also good. And it did make me laugh. The first book is funnier than the second but what is lost in situational comedy is gained in character development.
That is where these books stand the test of time. The stories themselves aren’t out of the ordinary, at least until the second book, but the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is. The book lives in the conversations between them; a true believer and a lost soul that wants to believe but has to be the buffer with reality.
Don Quixote has had such an influence that the name Quixote has become an English word (quixotic) meant to define an impossible quest based on romantic notions. And that’s why Don Quixote is loved. He is the guy tilting at windmills because, even though he sees a dragon, he’s trying to live up to an impossible ideal of what life could be. His motivation isn’t bad. We all act out of love when it really comes down to it and his actions are no exception. Only in his mind do his goals manifest, but unlike most of us, Quixote goes after them irrespective of the world might think because the only world that matter is the one he is living.
And Sancho sees what we see. Critics have argued that these novels are really about Sancho and his attempts to reconcile the real world with that of his master and that it is Sancho’s journey that most reflects the human condition. Don Quixote is simply the vehicle.
Either way, this is a must read. It is long, but surprising. Invest your time in the Man from La Mancha. You won’t regret it,
...less
bookshelves:
fiction-finished,
literature
Read in April, 2004
recommends it for:
The Literati And Pseudoliterati
I'll be the first to admit it: I'm a fan of popular fiction. I desire enjoyment from certain factors of pacing and style that the literary elite consider "common" and I, in turn, generally find "literature" to be incredibly pretentious. This has led me to hold what some might consider "uncultured" opinions about various great works.
Which brings us to Don Quixote, which many in the literary elite consider to be the greatest novel ever written.
Did I love Don...more
I'll be the first to admit it: I'm a fan of popular fiction. I desire enjoyment from certain factors of pacing and style that the literary elite consider "common" and I, in turn, generally find "literature" to be incredibly pretentious. This has led me to hold what some might consider "uncultured" opinions about various great works.
Which brings us to Don Quixote, which many in the literary elite consider to be the greatest novel ever written.
Did I love Don Quixote? I wouldn't go that far. Does it deserve to be called the greatest novel ever written? I'm willing to put it on the short list.
Here's the thing: Cervantes published Don Quixote in the early 17th century, while Shakespeare was still working through his "tragic" phase (Hamlet & whatnot). By rights, it should be like so much other "classic literature:" dense, slow, utterly irrelevant to modern life, and soporific. Instead, it's dense, slow, engaging, and surprisingly relevant. Cervantes manages, almost continuously, to be clever in ways that transcend the 400-year gap and resonate with us now. There's no question that adapting to the writing style of that era is a challenge, and Don Quixote will be slow going to readers accustomed to modern pop fiction. But most intelligent readers will consider this a price worth paying.
Why Don Quixote still works stems largely from its having taken the formulas of "heroic knighthood" (which we are still vaguely familiar with as legend today) and showing it to be cartoonish and absurd. Despite the cultural gap, modern readers will still get the gist of the parody, even if they haven't read the chivalric literature that it is an explicit parody of.
The other reason the story works is because, strangely, we find ourselves continuously at odds with the author over the character of Don Quixote himself. We are told, at every turn, that Quixote is a fool, a madman, and a sinner. Cervantes breaks from the traditional role of a passive narrator to make constant judgment on Quixote's failures and flaws. And because we see Quixote so maligned by both his own author and everyone in the book, we as the reader fall in love with him. By writing a book about a dreamer with unassailable ideals but using the narrative voice of a vitriolic cynic, Cervantes forces us to stand up for the nobility and purity that Quixote achieves. Cervantes has, in effect, martyred his own protagonist in such a dramatic way that it falls to the reader to elevate Quixote to the status of saint.
And any book that can pull that off is worth the difficult prose....less
Read in March, 2008
recommends it for:
Everyone
This book took me a long time to read. It is over 1,000 pages long! I had been wanting to read it for a long time, because it is considered the first novel and because the Spaniards are so proud of it and of Miguel Cervantes (the author). There are streets, libraries, buildings, etc. all over the place named after him or his book.
The thing that amazed me about this book is how entertaining it was, even though it was so long. It is usually difficult for long books to hold my interest but this...more
This book took me a long time to read. It is over 1,000 pages long! I had been wanting to read it for a long time, because it is considered the first novel and because the Spaniards are so proud of it and of Miguel Cervantes (the author). There are streets, libraries, buildings, etc. all over the place named after him or his book.
The thing that amazed me about this book is how entertaining it was, even though it was so long. It is usually difficult for long books to hold my interest but this one did. It tells of the various misadventures of an older Spanish gentleman who believes that he is a fearless traveling knight. He searches for adventures with his trusty squire Sancho Panza, and they certainly find their fair share.
The back of the book says "...life is an unending dialogue between a knight of the spirit who is ever striving to soar aloft, and a squire who strives with might and main to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground."
A lot of Don Quixote's initial adventures didn't seem to fit this description to me. In fact, the first part of the book was often exasperating, because Don Quixote would embark on "adventures" that would end up being real disasters. One of the worse was when he freed a group of prisoners from a chain gang, most of which were justly imprisoned. He caused damage and loss of property in other situations, and he really injured some people for no good reason. This didn't seem to me to fit the "noble spirit" part of the book's description.
In the second half of the book though I came to feel a bond and a connection with the crazy characters. By then, Sancho Panza is just as crazy as his master, if not more so, but when people played tricks on him for their own amusement, I got really upset at the nerve those people had.
Finally, besides being entertaining, there are little nuggets of great wisdom throughout the book, much as there were in Les Miserables which is so often quoted. For example, "consider what you are and try to know yourself, which is the most difficult study in the world." Don Quixote then goes on to describe how knowing oneself and one's origins can help keep one from pride and from sin. There are many, many sage bits of advice throughout the book, which I should have written down, but did not.
In short, this book is great and I recommend reading it. Don't be worried about finishing it, just savor a little each day until it is done. ...less
bookshelves:
classics,
humour
Shakespearean feel - more in the plotting and tales within tales (eg The Man Who was Recklessly Curious, stolen by Mozart for Cosi fan Tutte) than the language. In fact, the story of Cardenio is thought to be the basis for Shakespeare's lost play of the same name. Very funny - slapstick, toilet and more subtle humour, with lots of factual historical and chivalric detail as well, but it doesn't feel especially Spanish to me. Certainly long, but I don't understand why, supposedly, so few people ma...more
Shakespearean feel - more in the plotting and tales within tales (eg The Man Who was Recklessly Curious, stolen by Mozart for Cosi fan Tutte) than the language. In fact, the story of Cardenio is thought to be the basis for Shakespeare's lost play of the same name. Very funny - slapstick, toilet and more subtle humour, with lots of factual historical and chivalric detail as well, but it doesn't feel especially Spanish to me. Certainly long, but I don't understand why, supposedly, so few people manage to finish it. Some of DQ's delusions hurt only himself (tilting at windmills), but others lead to suffering for his "squire" Sancho Panza (tossed in a blanket) or reluctant beneficiaries of his salvation (the beaten servant, beaten even more once DQ departs) and bemuse people (mistaking inns for castles, sheep for enemy armies and ordinary women as princesses) and are used to justify theft (the golden "helmet"/bowl) and non-payment to inn-keepers. His resolute optimism in the face of severe pain and disaster is extraordinary. Meanwhile, Sancho wavers between credulity (wishfully thinking the promise of an island for him to rule will come true) and pragmatism. Reading it whilst Tristan and Anders repeatedly watched and quoted Monthy Python's Holy Grail was amusing!
Part II starts with Cervantes' response to the unknown writer of an unofficial sequel to part 1, though DQ, Sancho and others also critique it in early chapters. The following story presumes that part 1 is true, and shows how DQ's resulting fame affects his subsequent adventures. A very modern mix of "fact" and fiction. Some characters doubt his exploits, others pander to them, especially the duke and duchess who go to great lengths to treat him in knightly/chivalric manner, and provide new adventures (for their amusement, at the painful expense of DQ and Sancho). Sancho gets rather more scope for lengthy meanderings of jumbled and largely irrelevant proverbs. Less slapstick and more pontificating than part I - both DQ's advice to Sancho on how to govern his promised insula and when Sancho has intriguing disputes to resolve.
...less
Read in March, 2008
recommended to Alison by:
Jorge Luis Borges
Woo-hoo, Brooke owes me a beer (which I'll feed to Karl)!
I don't know if it was because I was tired (I only read it in bed before going to sleep at night), but after 6 months I'd gotten through only the first 100-odd pages. But then it (or I) started flying. The first thing that got me was the cat joke (im in yr cavalcade saturizing yr litrary deloojuns), then the rapidly escalating violence, and by the time Sancho got tossed in a blanket, I was laughing out loud every few pages.
Nothin...more
Woo-hoo, Brooke owes me a beer (which I'll feed to Karl)!
I don't know if it was because I was tired (I only read it in bed before going to sleep at night), but after 6 months I'd gotten through only the first 100-odd pages. But then it (or I) started flying. The first thing that got me was the cat joke (im in yr cavalcade saturizing yr litrary deloojuns), then the rapidly escalating violence, and by the time Sancho got tossed in a blanket, I was laughing out loud every few pages.
Nothing amuses me more than cat jokes and blanket jokes, but a close second was the self-consciousness in Part 2. It's probably because I rarely read earlier than the 19th century (and me, married to a medievalist! Shame), and seldom read works translated from other languages, but I saw happening a lot of things I'd associated only with 20thC experimental and postmodern fiction: Don Quixote and Sancho discovering that they're characters not only in DQ Part I, but also in a spurious sequel that they diss; meeting rabid fans of the first book who, in order to enjoy the spectacle, design a series of new adventures for Don Quixote--the duke and duchess actually invent the majority of Part 2, and in their excesses become almost as "mad" as Don Quixote; and meeting a character fom the bad, non-Cervantes sequel who declares his shock at meeting OUR Don Quixote and Sancho and discovering that they're far superior to the other ones he knew. Finally, I loved the conclusion, where the fictional author Cide Hamete Benengeli declares that "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write; the two of us alone are one." Now I have a context for Borges' joke about Pierre Menard.
I did find some bits tedious and repetitive. But the pleasures were pretty extreme....less
Read in May, 2007
As a kid did you ever dream about being a knight like the ones in the books you read? Well in Don Quixote, a delusional 50 year old man starts trying to fulfill this dream. Journeying through Spain with his squire Sancho Panza, Don Quixote finds many "adventures" that to most people wouldn't seem like adventures at all, but to Don Quixote who is thinks windmills are giants, and a flock of sheep is an army, anything is an adventure.
One very enjoyable part is that the main charac...more
As a kid did you ever dream about being a knight like the ones in the books you read? Well in Don Quixote, a delusional 50 year old man starts trying to fulfill this dream. Journeying through Spain with his squire Sancho Panza, Don Quixote finds many "adventures" that to most people wouldn't seem like adventures at all, but to Don Quixote who is thinks windmills are giants, and a flock of sheep is an army, anything is an adventure.
One very enjoyable part is that the main characters both exhibit completely contradictory traits. Don Quixote is completely sane and very intelligent until the subject of chivalry is brought up at which point his madness prevails. Sancho is a complete fool (he follows around a madman that he knows his mad), but occassionally proves himself to be incredibly wise. The interactions between the sane madman and the wise fool provide some very interesting dynamics. Another interesting aspect of this book is that the characters in the book actually read a book based on Don Quixote's adventures and those who encounter him after reading always make up some plot to take advantage of his quirks for their entertainment.
I would have given this book five stars, but I was not a very big fan of the ending. Based on the premise with which the book was written (to denounce chivalry books) the way it ends makes sense, but I think Cervantes could have established the point by keeping true to the absurdity of his characters instead of completely changing the character in the last few pages to get his point across....less
Well, third time was the charm in this case. I'll spare you the personal history this book and I have.
I read the book on my own, not part of school. Both volumes, to the last word. I just read a modern fantasy novel that was about 900 pages, in about 1.5 weeks. This book (about 1000 or so pages)took me nearly 1.5 years. I read about 50 other books in this period as sometimes I dreaded the DQ. This is not a book to try to read in bed, unless your doing late fall trail work in the remote wild...more
Well, third time was the charm in this case. I'll spare you the personal history this book and I have.
I read the book on my own, not part of school. Both volumes, to the last word. I just read a modern fantasy novel that was about 900 pages, in about 1.5 weeks. This book (about 1000 or so pages)took me nearly 1.5 years. I read about 50 other books in this period as sometimes I dreaded the DQ. This is not a book to try to read in bed, unless your doing late fall trail work in the remote wilderness and are reading by candle/headlamp light after the sun goes down around 6 pm.
At first I hated Don Quixote. I thought he was definitely mentally ill and should be locked up. However, the unjustified attacks on innocents seem to lessen as the story goes on. I guess If I had a horse, armour and a lance I'd be looking for any excuse to run someone through too.
I think Sancho makes the book. Whether it be his constant head shaking at his master or being on the receiving end of a volley of his master's outdated insults. I love the inter-text "The Impertinent Curiosity" and I enjoyed the whole Moore story saga.
I found the part with the Count and Countess dragged on forever in the second volume. I can imagine some people quitting at this point. Although the flying horse part was quite hilarious.
What blew my mind about this book was how relevant Cervantes's musings and observations are to our modern life. Ok..I'll finish this later......less
bookshelves:
happyendings-,
wish-i-owned
Read in January, 2004
recommends it for:
knights errant; the sorrowful-faced
I really regret leaving my edition of this book on the curb when I moved out of that Brooklyn apartment. I was like, "Oh, super translation and lovely red cover, but it's really heavy and it's not like I'm gonna need to reread *Don Quixote* any time soon..... I need to quit being such a materialistic packrat!" Actually, I tossed tons of great stuff during that move, but this is the book I've regretted the most.
I DREAMT about this book on Saturday night. I had this really stressful ...more
I really regret leaving my edition of this book on the curb when I moved out of that Brooklyn apartment. I was like, "Oh, super translation and lovely red cover, but it's really heavy and it's not like I'm gonna need to reread *Don Quixote* any time soon..... I need to quit being such a materialistic packrat!" Actually, I tossed tons of great stuff during that move, but this is the book I've regretted the most.
I DREAMT about this book on Saturday night. I had this really stressful dream where I was stuck on a college campus in Ohio of all places (because of Columbus Day weekend, I guess) and I had all this crap I needed to get back to New York. I missed my flight and wouldn't get another one, nor could I figure out a way to get all these possessions back with me, and everything was rushed and terrible and, as I said, really stressful. Anyway, this book was one of the main things in the room full of stuff I was trying to get back to New York, and the reason I missed my flight. It was sitting on this shelf in its red glory, and I just needed to figure out a way to get it back home with me, which was hard, and the figuring out was keeping me stuck in Ohio, where I really didn't want to be.
So what do you guys think *that* means?...less
No question - finishing this book is a triumph. There are some real comical parts, and obviously Cervantes is mocking ridiculous literary romances. More so than remembering all the little instances in the book, one remembers the characters - Don Quixote - the idealistic, bumbling, adventure-seeking, crazy (?) knight, and his earthy, not-so-intelligent, practical squire, Sancho Panza.
But the question is, as it is in Hamlet, is Don Quixote really crazy. And I think the answer, as it is in Ham...more
No question - finishing this book is a triumph. There are some real comical parts, and obviously Cervantes is mocking ridiculous literary romances. More so than remembering all the little instances in the book, one remembers the characters - Don Quixote - the idealistic, bumbling, adventure-seeking, crazy (?) knight, and his earthy, not-so-intelligent, practical squire, Sancho Panza.
But the question is, as it is in Hamlet, is Don Quixote really crazy. And I think the answer, as it is in Hamlet, is "no." Hamlet is the greatest conciousness in his play, and he seeks to re-order his world. Don Quixote doesn't have quite the intellect that does Hamlet, but he does the same thing, in that he is trying to re-order his world to a design that he likes better. I've come to think that he knows exactly what he is doing, and sometimes he even understands the ridiculousness of it, but he PREFERS his way of interacting with the world, and so he does it....
Unamuno claims Quixote represents the will to the survive, and the fight for the inextinguishable ideal. Bloom acknowledges that Quixote plays a deep game with reality and asks the question: are we to be saved (securlarly) by ourselves being turned into fictions?
May I suggest, that - To be, or not to be your own fiction - that is the question!
...less
Read in January, 2008
What can be said about a book of this scope that has already been said. I'll give mine in brief.
I'm still working on this one. This is my second 800+ book in a row. So it has taken me longer than I had hoped. I've become emotionally attached to all these characters.
With Rutherford's translation it is hard to believe it was written so long ago. I've become emotionally attached to all these characters. With such ease Cervantes creates such depth to each of his characters no matter ...more
What can be said about a book of this scope that has already been said. I'll give mine in brief.
I'm still working on this one. This is my second 800+ book in a row. So it has taken me longer than I had hoped. I've become emotionally attached to all these characters.
With Rutherford's translation it is hard to believe it was written so long ago. I've become emotionally attached to all these characters. With such ease Cervantes creates such depth to each of his characters no matter how long they stay in the picture. As the book goes on and others leave the picture you want to know more about the lesser characters.
I'll finish this within the next week. I see myself reading this amazing classic again.
*Update* 1/13/08 Finished a few days ago. I have so many thoughts about the book I don't know where to begin. I will probably continue this review as I come to terms with all of my questions. I encourage anyone who wants to read DQ or has started and stopped, just go for it. It took me a few months (8 I think), in that time I read other books, took care of my new born and even went 3-4 weeks without picking it up. But I was always thinking about it. I now can say that I have read the "the very first novel". It feels good to have that under my belt.
...less
Read in September, 2006
Reading this book will open another door in your appreciation of all subsequent literature. The man from whom the phrase "tilting at windmills" originated, Cervantes created in his mock epic one of the first critical satires of chivalric romance. But more than that, he gave readers a daringly new psychological portrait of a man undaunted by reality in his quest to emulate the heroics of knight-errantry. Following the tradition of Amadis de Gaul, Don Belianis, and Reinaldos of Montalban...more
Reading this book will open another door in your appreciation of all subsequent literature. The man from whom the phrase "tilting at windmills" originated, Cervantes created in his mock epic one of the first critical satires of chivalric romance. But more than that, he gave readers a daringly new psychological portrait of a man undaunted by reality in his quest to emulate the heroics of knight-errantry. Following the tradition of Amadis de Gaul, Don Belianis, and Reinaldos of Montalban, Quixote is joined on his mad endeavors by the pragmatic everyman Sancho Panza, a simple laborer of their native La Mancha and one of literature's first sidekicks. Coaxed from the comfort of village life by Quixote's fanciful promises of fortune, Sancho joins him on his travels throughout 16th-century Spain, where they meet all sorts of characters (mostly downtrodden) and have all sorts encounters (mostly disasterous) in search of glory. This is a beautiful, heart-breaking, hilarious tale that has no equal. For anyone who has ever tilted at windmills, hoping like me to find in deep woods or high mountains a shred of adventure spared by the incessant onslaught of life's lackluster demands, this book is for you....less
For a four hundred year old novel, this one was both hilarious and entertaining. Parts of it certainly drag (there's an entire novella unrelated to Don Quixote's adventures), and it is 1050 pages, but I thought it was overall more than worth the effort.
Don Quixote, driven mad by reading "books of chivalry", sets out into 17th century Spain as a knight errant, calling himself the Knight of the Rueful Figure. To him, inns are castles, windmills are giants, and a milkmaid in a neigh...more
For a four hundred year old novel, this one was both hilarious and entertaining. Parts of it certainly drag (there's an entire novella unrelated to Don Quixote's adventures), and it is 1050 pages, but I thought it was overall more than worth the effort.
Don Quixote, driven mad by reading "books of chivalry", sets out into 17th century Spain as a knight errant, calling himself the Knight of the Rueful Figure. To him, inns are castles, windmills are giants, and a milkmaid in a neighboring town becomes his peerless lady, Dulcinea of El Toboso. After an ill-fated first expedition, he convinces a local herdsman to come along as his squire after promising him the governorship of and island, such as knights errant are always distributing to their squires. The relationship between the two is both touching and side-splitting.
Don Quixote's exploits are humorous, but at the same time the author makes some commentary on the cynicism of a world with no room for heroes and chivalry. In a way, Don Quixote is nobler than all those who mock and seek to cure him, because in his insanity he longs for greatness. Definitely a lot to think about here.
(Note: I read the Signet Classics translation)...less
bookshelves:
1001-books
Read in March, 2008
recommends it for:
scholars
Finally finished! Took me I'm guessing 12-18 mos. to read this. I set it down a couple times for long periods of time, and have read countless books since I started this one.
I really had hoped that this would just grab me. I love that song, "The Impossible Dream". I have to say now that the meaning of that song and the show it was written for may have been gleaned from the source material the writers, but I myself didn't get anything like that directly from the source material....more
Finally finished! Took me I'm guessing 12-18 mos. to read this. I set it down a couple times for long periods of time, and have read countless books since I started this one.
I really had hoped that this would just grab me. I love that song, "The Impossible Dream". I have to say now that the meaning of that song and the show it was written for may have been gleaned from the source material the writers, but I myself didn't get anything like that directly from the source material.
I came to appreciate Cervantes' irony, and as I eased into an appreciation and sense of patience with this book (which had at first seemed incredibly tedious), I even was able to be mildly amused by the antics of crazy Don Quixote, and especially Sancho Panza. But at the end - there is no moral. There is no point. Everything the book has to say is provided in the body, and at one very slow pace. There was no dynamism to it for me.
I will say that this translator's footnotes were very helpful to me.
Personally, this book is so long, and was not that rewarding, I wish I devoted some of my "classics" time to a couple other books I haven't ever read, maybe Moby Dick, a Hemingway, and something else....less
bookshelves:
classics
Read in March, 2008
I've wanted to read this book since 1996 when my friend Becky introduced me to the musical Man of La Mancha with Peter O'Toole, which I loved. I started reading the book shortly thereafter, but I didn't get very far. (This is a a tome of 940 pages, after all.)
This time I finished it, and, although I don't plan to read it again, I did enjoy it, or most of it. The first half was a bit dark, with Don Quixote unwittingly wronging more rights than he righted wrongs. The second half was...more
I've wanted to read this book since 1996 when my friend Becky introduced me to the musical Man of La Mancha with Peter O'Toole, which I loved. I started reading the book shortly thereafter, but I didn't get very far. (This is a a tome of 940 pages, after all.)
This time I finished it, and, although I don't plan to read it again, I did enjoy it, or most of it. The first half was a bit dark, with Don Quixote unwittingly wronging more rights than he righted wrongs. The second half was much more lighthearted, with many of his misadventures created by his "admirers" who wished to derive greater amusement from his antics.
The musical incorporates elements from the novel, such as the helmet of Mambrino, which is actually a barber's basin, the castle, which is really an inn, and the giant, which is actually a windmill. That's about where the similarities end. The book has dozens of additional adventures, as well as a couple of novellas and some interesting plot twists involving other characters. It is really cleverly written, and I did enjoy this translation....less
![100 Greatest Books of All Time [Franklin Library]](http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/groups/1214759499p2/5313.jpg)
