Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene
This beautiful little book is a picaresque novel depicting the travels of fools and rogues all the while shimmering like a well cut diamond.
More than any other writer I know, Greene subjugates style for story, and himself to what he wants to say. Cast on a spinnet of Cervantes Don Quixote, with the Bible and various communist tracts as bedfellows, this beautiful innocent wanders Spain with his Sancho Panza, in his little car, the seat 600.
But it is not Spain that these two traverse but the whole mongrel depth and breadth of human goodness and aspiration- significantly Friendship, Belief, Religion, Doubt, Understanding, Death, Politics and Hypocrisy.
Greene does not make the fatal error of sticking to the script- instead he does what all good writers from Shakespeare and Dickens to Updike and Amis do, and remembers the reader. After all, Cervantes work's 1000 pages of small print, by my estimate half a million words, and covers battles with flocks of sheep, smashing puppets mistaken for soldiers, and getting bounced in blankets. Greene keeps his eye on the main game- doubt- and plays that game superbly. In reading this book i have much better idea of what perturbed Greene himself.
Paying tribute to the real Quixote's observation that "There are no birds this year in last year's nests". as meaning nothing , "but the beauty is enough"; rendering fiction as fact; and accepting that the real Quixote was a madman who was yet an idealist of the first water; Greene's Quixote refers to God as a "mosquito" to prayer as "wax in the eternal ear"; and doubt as being far superior to firm belief. Such beautiful lines: "Sancho, Sancho, we disagree too profoundly to dispute".
Greene is the measure by which other writers should be judged.
More than any other writer I know, Greene subjugates style for story, and himself to what he wants to say. Cast on a spinnet of Cervantes Don Quixote, with the Bible and various communist tracts as bedfellows, this beautiful innocent wanders Spain with his Sancho Panza, in his little car, the seat 600.
But it is not Spain that these two traverse but the whole mongrel depth and breadth of human goodness and aspiration- significantly Friendship, Belief, Religion, Doubt, Understanding, Death, Politics and Hypocrisy.
Greene does not make the fatal error of sticking to the script- instead he does what all good writers from Shakespeare and Dickens to Updike and Amis do, and remembers the reader. After all, Cervantes work's 1000 pages of small print, by my estimate half a million words, and covers battles with flocks of sheep, smashing puppets mistaken for soldiers, and getting bounced in blankets. Greene keeps his eye on the main game- doubt- and plays that game superbly. In reading this book i have much better idea of what perturbed Greene himself.
Paying tribute to the real Quixote's observation that "There are no birds this year in last year's nests". as meaning nothing , "but the beauty is enough"; rendering fiction as fact; and accepting that the real Quixote was a madman who was yet an idealist of the first water; Greene's Quixote refers to God as a "mosquito" to prayer as "wax in the eternal ear"; and doubt as being far superior to firm belief. Such beautiful lines: "Sancho, Sancho, we disagree too profoundly to dispute".
Greene is the measure by which other writers should be judged.
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