A review by nwhyte
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

http://nhw.livejournal.com/156774.html[return][return]It's surprisingly approachable, for Great Literature, but very long at almost 1000 pages in the Penguin edition, so I've given myself a break after finishing the first part, as published in 1605 (almost 400 years ago), and will leave the second part, of 1615, for some later time.[return][return]It reminds me of nothing so much as Tristram Shandy, except that it has a far more coherent plot (this is not saying much of course). Don Quixote himself is gloriously delusional, and of course unwittingly plays a satirical role in exposing the workings of society. Interesting too that the distance between his society of 1605 and ours of 2004 seems much less than the distance between 1605 and the medieval world of chivalry which he imagines himself to inhabit. Of course Quixote's medieval world is a creation of fantasy, and his 1605 is rooted very firmly in contemporary reality.[return][return]Apart from the narrative frame of Don Quixote himself and his delusions, there are lots of romantic sub-plots - actually so distinct from one another that you could almost call them novellas - some of which eventually get tied together in a way that is reminiscent of Wodehouse. Added to that, the geopolitical tension of Spain vs the Islamic world of North Africa is eerily reminiscent of another modern genre - the beautiful Zoraida almost seems like an ancestor of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.[return][return]For all that, I'm not utterly convinced that this really is the best novel of all time. I'm sure it deserves honour and celebration as being the first (or among the first) attempts to write a novel per se. But to say that is a bit like Johnson's remark about a woman preaching being like a dog walking on its hind legs, the impressive thing being not that it is done well but that it is done at all. Perhaps if I ever get around to the second half it will make more of an impact on me.[return][return][return][return]http://nhw.livejournal.com/1031434.html[return][return]Well, I finally managed it: the second half of Don Quixote, having read the first part three years ago. It hangs together rather better than the first part - much less episodic, one senses that unlike his characters the author knew which way things were going. There is some nasty business with a Duke and Duchess who set our heroes up for a series of practical jokes; but Sancho Panza acquits himself very well from it all. In the end, Quixote's neighbours get him to just give it a rest, and the world is obviously a poorer place as a result. (Also he then dies, to reinforce the point.)[return][return]One recurrent theme of Volume II is that Quixote and Panza keep on bumping into people who know them not only from Volume I (published ten years before) but also from the seventeenth-century equivalent of fan fiction; in an early chapter, Panza is prevailed upon to explain a couple of continuity glitches from the previous volume, and there's a repeated complaint that the fanfic writers have got the leading characters completely wrong. [return][return]It didn't blow me away, to be honest, in the same way that Proust has been doing; but it is one of those books everyone should try and get through.