Don Quixote by Cervantes

*contains spoilers*


There is something about The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha that will resonate with us lovers of books willing enough to pick up thick tomes such as this in the first place: he absolutely loves books – the chivalric tales of knights errant, specifically. As each of these pages is folded over and over, and as each tale winds its way through towns, plains, forests, and fields, Don Quixote teaches us about the knights of old, such as Amadis of Gaul, and the romanticism of a bygone literary era.


Don Quixote is, of course, a madman. On reading all of his beloved chivalric tales in the stacks of volumes he keeps at his house, he decides one day to pull together a rusty and haphazard armour, dons it, mounts his scabby horse, Rocinante, employs a local idiot farmer, Sancho Panza as his squire, and they all set off on their adventures. The world into which these two fantastic characters ride is astonished by them, almost as much as they are by it; some of the world’s people play along for their own ends, some play along just for the fun of it, some play along out of pity, some don’t even bother playing along at all and even beat them to a pulp in their actually rather understandable frustration. Along the way, regardless, we smile with, frown at, chuckle to and cheer with these two incredible rogues.


The novel is presented rather interestingly: Cervantes speaks as someone collating the dishevelled pile of loose manuscripts of a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli, and he comments on the inconsistencies of the source material as he goes along. The first half of the first part is presented as your typical comedic recounting, which then goes on to relate the histories of characters such as Cardenio, about whom Shakespeare wrote a play, whose story is also as rich and interesting as the main story of any other great work of fiction. The second part deals with the events following the popularisation of the first part, and Don Quixote and Sancho must contend with the fame – for better or worse – that follows. The text remains throughout a piece of satire, mocking the fantasy world and characterisation of the chivalric tales much-beloved by Don Quixote, whilst also being unafraid to show the genre some reverence and pity too. At one point this text was voted the greatest of all time (yes, sit down, Kanye), and it’s very easy to see how and why.


One to go back to, certainly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chouans by Honoré de Balzac

*contains spoilers* The Chouans , the first of Honoré de Balzac’s many contributions to his panoramic narrative world, latterly titled La Comédie Humaine , should have been the text with which I began my likely long adventure through this author’s works. On a whim of sorts, I read Cousin Bette (1847), unaware of its place in the corpus; and then, once cognisant of the galactic extent of La Comédie Humaine , and as a way for me to gain a surer footing going forwards, I moved on to Père Goriot (1835), which appears towards the front end of the narrative arc. One constraint that exists at the outset for those readers who cannot speak nor indeed read French is that of accessibility to the words on the page in one’s given language. Considering the wealth of material to-hand, examples of translators either willing or able to step forwards to build those bridges over the last two centuries, and thus allow readers of other languages entry into the afterlife of the original texts (Walter Benj...
Read more

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

*contains spoilers* ‘The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial.’ David B. Morris. I have to say from the outset that I wrote more notes during the reading of this book than I have while reading any other text – which, given its wordcount relative to the likes of War and Peace , Don Quixote , Middlemarch , etc., speaks for itself. That so much can potentially be plumbed from so few words reflects, I think, both the philosophical depths of the content and its relevance to the experiences of those within our time. In fact, it is so densely packed with suggestion that questions and ideas kept irrepressibly springing forth. However, that may also have a lot to do with my own philosophical ponderings at the time of reading. This blog post will only pertain to a few, choice threads which specifically resonated with me; but, be assured, there is so much more that ...
Read more

Spies by Michael Frayn

*contains spoilers* Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Frayn’s bildungsroman, Spies, embarks on a journey of reminiscence and lamentation of his early years following a nostalgic whiff of “liguster”, later identified as “privet”, on his daughter’s driveway one evening. Now a man of eighty-something, Stephen leaves his homeland of Germany for the Close of his childhood town in England, as he yearns to search for the answers to the questions painfully reawakened by his olfactory senses. Frayn uses Stephen as an unreliable narrator, fluctuating sporadically between Stephen’s past and present self as he reminisces on the events that shaped his transition from naïve innocence to realised maturity. This method of Frayn’s not only effectively accentuates the differences between the two Stephens, it also creates gaps in the plot providing the reader with further unanswered questions, creating a sense of tension and growing interest as Stephen’s memories are broken, realised, questioned, reconsi...
Read more