Like many books that already I should have read, Don Quixote had been neglected for far too long—Tsundoku and everything. I am now reading Cervante’s hilarious novel for the first time and am immediately tickled by the Jared and Jerusha Hess comedic style (Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite definitely come to mind).
Lines such as “the reason for your unreasonable treatment of my reason, so enfeebles my reason that I have reason to complain of your beauty,” and “the high heavens which, with your divinity, divinely fortify you with the stars and make you the deserver of the desert that is deserved by your greatness,” greatly delight me, likely to the same degree they bewilder the understanding of his many antagonists.
So, just for the sport of it, be warned that having only journeyed a few chapters into the quest, I shall be making some occasional comments along the way, sharing some of my first impressions and initial thoughts on this Spanish masterpiece. I’ll not only talk about the story itself—its humorous commonplaces, unpredictable twists and turns, etc.—but also about some of its structure and meaning. It is a satire, after all, so it should be amusing and enlightening.
In case you, too, have not yet read the novel, I’ll leave you with this brief summary of what Aristotle calls its “beginning.” Excited by his agreeable delusions for chivalry, the Don of La Mancha is determined to pursue the quests of a knight-errant. We are told that he was so taken in by knight-errant literature that he sold off most of his land to buy books about the subject. Soon his imagination was so filled with bookish phantasmagoria that he “lost his wits completely” and believed “no history in the world more authentic.”
With that, let the narrator’s explanation be a warning to book lovers everywhere:
he so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason. His imagination became filled with a host of fancies he had read in his books—enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, courtships, loves, tortures and many other absurdities.
A quick reminder that our next meeting of the Poiema Reading Society is scheduled for Monday, July 31st at 5:00 pm PT / 8:00 pm ET. As a reminder, we are reading and will be discussing the following Flannery O’Connor’s short stories:
- A Good Man is Hard to Find
- Everything That Rises Must Converge
- Revelation
I also want to encourage you to read her two novellas, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Both are fairly short (thus, novella’s). Depending on how our discussions on the short stories go, we can engage these novellas or save them for a future meeting. See you on July 31st.
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