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.