50 Book Challenge: Book 34
Don Quixote – Book 1 – Miguel de Cervantes
So, I made a list by genre of everything I had read this year. And it didn’t look too impressive, to be perfectly honest with you. A very good amount of thrillers, noir detective novels and other crime fiction. Graphic novels and a bit of fantasy and sci-fi. Lots of things bought on three-for-two offers. Admittedly there was a lesser-known novel by Charlotte Bronte in the mix but that was not, on its own, enough to save it. I was doing pretty well on speed of reading, having got more than 60 per cent of my way through the 50 Book Challenge by the halfway point in June. So I decided to burn a little bit of the leeway I had built up by reading something serious. My whole and entire ambition for July was to read Miguel de Cervantes’ classic of Spanish literature and work with a seminal influence on the novel form: Don Quixote.
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It’s another one of those books I should have read as a student and didn’t – hence the fact I own a copy in the first place. But we all know very well by now that buying a book and putting it on a prominent bookshelf to impress visitors is not the same as reading said book. The thing about Don Quixote is that everybody thinks they know the basics already – a noble bloke following the lone path of heroism and high ideals even when it is poignantly pointless, hence the tilting at windmills and the invention of a brand new adjective for the purpose: quixotic. The reality is a little different. Senor Quixana (as he may or may not be called) has led the quiet life of a country gentleman until he suffers what can only really be viewed as a major mid-life crisis. He reinvents himself as Don Quixote and does the equivalent of buying a great big Harley Davidson and a set of bikers’ leathers quite inappropriate for an elderly gentleman. He sets off in hopes of impressing a much younger woman and proving he’s not past it only to get in trouble with the law and end up breaking both his legs on some death-defying country road. The twist is that reading books of chivalry, the premier genre fiction of Cervantes’ day, has addled his brains to such a degree that he’s no longer able to tell fact from fiction. Rather than a rather wistful, nobly-motivated character, as I had always imagined, the Don is in fact a rude, stubborn and belligerent old bloke with a nasty temper who does some incredibly stupid and antisocial things in the pursuit of his chivalric ideals – freeing dangerous prisoners who go on to rob and assault him and others, defrauding hostellers, laying hands on women, beating up itinerant barbers and stealing their equipment… the list goes on and on.
His squire Sancho Panza, likewise, is a thoroughly venal figure, knowing somewhere deep down that the whole charade of knight-errantry is essentially nonsense but so blinded by promises from his master of earldoms, islands to rule and populations to sell into slavery that he abandons his wife and family to play along, desperately hoping that the myth will turn out to be reality. In many ways this reminded me of nothing so much as a particularly earthy Tom Sharpe farce – tales of hilariously-mistaken identities, wrongly-swapped beds and trousers at half-mast, knockabout humour and an almost Shakespearian fascination with ingénues of both sexes who are forever falling importunately in love, abandoning family and fortune and wringing out their hearts. From which you may gather that, so far, it has been fantastically readable. The famously picaresque nature of the story means the scene is always changing, new characters are constantly introduced, tales are told within the narrative and there’s always more than enough incident and colour to keep you turning the pages. Of course, when you’ve got more than a thousand pages of rather close text, this is quite important. It does cast a fantastic light on many other books as well – once you have read this you can detect its previously unsuspected influence everywhere.
At the end of book one the Don has been persuaded to give up his life of chivalry and delusional knight-errantry and return home for a cure. I pronounce myself well-satisfied and ready (after maybe just a couple of detective novels) to embark on the second part.
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