Don Quixote Rides On

I was just in the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s Mt Tam in Marin County in the distance. It’s sunny, which is pleasant, but the cloudlessness of the California skies are a problem too—the whole state is in a serious, five year drought. My husband and I are visiting in-laws of various generations and are being inaugurated into sharing our shower water, collected in large orange plastic Home Depot buckets with the potted plants on the deck.

And of course that’s Don Quixote in the foreground. Who else could it be? His skinny, irrepressible and idiotic courage is known to most of us, even though the chances we’ve read Cervantes’ brilliant novel are about nil.

The Man of La Mancha stands tall along a grassy path along the Bay near the Larkspur-to-San Francisco ferry dock. Maybe he’s looking for water, or praying for rain.

We likely haven’t read the novel Don Quixote because it’s over 900 pages long. Published in 2 volumes in 1605 and 1615 it’s often considered the first novel ever. Not only long, it’s tricky. There is a story within a story within a story, told by a possibly unreliable narrator who’s in jail. Really quite post-modern, if you think about it. And there’s funny bits too. Nabokov said that Don Quixote “stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.” Milan Kundera (another writer on my short list) said that “Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive.”

I recently bought a new translation of Don Quixote and am determined to read it. It’s in paperback and the translator is Edith Grossman. Anyone want to read along with me? We could post about it every couple hundred pages. I love the way the chapters are all subtitled, like “Which tells the first sally that the ingenious Don Quixote made from his native land,” (Chapter II) and “Concerning what happened to our knight when he left the inn” (Chapter IV) Or how about “Which recounts Sancho’s ingenuity in enchanting the lady Dulcinea, and other events as ridiculous as they are true” (Chapter X)?

The book ends as all life does, with Don Quixote’s death, in Chapter LXXIV “Which deals with how Don Quixote fell ill, and the will he made, and his death.”

I guess we’d also have to brush up on our Roman numerals if we want to read the book.