Don Quixote -- Part Two (a book review post)

A thing most people don't realize is that Don Quixote is actually two books written a decade apart. I know I didn't know before I picked up the book and did some background research on it. That's always a good thing, by the way. To understand the second book, in fact, you really need to understand the context of when and why Cervantes wrote it. Yes, there will be some spoilers (but not too many but one that reveals the end of the book).

Cervantes purposefully left the end of the first book open for a sequel, to put it in today's terms. Not the he necessarily intended to write one, but he wanted to be able to write more about Quixote if he wanted to. And he might have if the first book hadn't become the huge success that it became. "What?" you say, "That doesn't make sense." But it did.

See, Don Quixote became the most read book in the world at the time. Cervantes became a household name. He was world famous. It sounds great, right? It was... except for the part where he didn't receive a dime for his work. There was nothing to stop people from just printing his work on their own, no laws or anything protecting creators or copyrights or anything, and that's what people did. All over the world. So, although Quixote was a worldwide bestseller, Cervantes stayed penniless (which is how he died). I'm pretty sure that eroded his desire to actually go back and revisit Don Quixote and Sancho.

Until someone published a fake sequel. That pissed Cervantes off and prompted him to get to work on the second book. And here's why that's important: There are specific portions of the second book that are there to, basically, debunk the fake sequel. And, um, then Cervantes kills Quixote off at the end of the book so that no one else could write anymore fake Quixote stories. No better way to take care of that issue, I suppose.

As for the book itself, in many ways it's better than the first book, but it also suffers a little from addressing the audience about the fake sequel. It breaks the narrative. It's also amusing in sections, like when Quixote finds out that he supposedly goes somewhere in the fake book, so he completely avoids that place so as not to be confused with the fake Don Quixote.

The second book contains a bit more satire than the first and makes many of its points through making fun of Quixote and Panza. Sancho, though, frequently rises above the jokes being played on him, and the portion dealing with him as the governor of his "island" are some of the best in both books.

At any rate, you're not going to find the two books published separately, and it's unlikely that you'll want to stop reading at the end of book one if you get to the end of book one. So I'll say it again: Don Quixote is well worth reading, even 400 years after its original publication. Cervantes was a great writer. It's too bad he didn't write other novels. He did write some plays early in his life, and I might have to look into some of those. Don't let the length daunt you. Just dive in.

Don Quixote -- Part One (a book review post)

I'm going to start by pointing out the obvious: Don Quixote is a long book. My copy, which is in small print, has more than 1000 pages. This is the main reason why it's taken me so long to read it. Not that I'm daunted by long books, but I would look at it and look at my other books and think that I could read so many other books in the same time it took to read Don Quixote, and that's what I would do. [I had the same problem when I was a kid collecting Star Wars toys. There would be some big item I wanted, like the Millennium Falcon or an AT-AT, that I would save up money to get but, when I got to the store, I would look at that one thing and realize how many action figures I could buy with the same money and end up buying the action figures.] I'm sorry I waited so long to read it.

Don Quixote is a great book full of laugh out loud moments. Now, understand, this is a book that was written 400 years ago. What this tells me, which is something I already knew but this serves as confirmation, is people don't really change all that much. I mean, you have everything here, from Quixote and Sancho puking in each other's faces to political satire to ripping on other authors' popularity despite poor quality writing to statements about the human condition. The book is compelling and a surprisingly fast read. At least it was for me.

Just the basics in case you don't know them: Quixote (not his real name) is a minor Spanish noble in love with chivalry and everything to do with it, so much so that he decides to become a knight. Let me be clear about this: He just decides to become a knight. This would be like just deciding to become Batman. You go out and buy a Batman costume and a bunch of gadgets and start stalking the streets in hopes of finding bad guys to beat up. Essentially, this is what Quixote does. He puts on some armor, gets his nag of a horse, and hits the trails looking for bad guys to defeat in honorable combat. Needless to say, hi-jinks ensue. And a little bit of crazy. Okay, a lot of crazy.

The crazy is best summed up in the whole tilting-at-windmills scene but only because, if there's anything people know about Don Quixote, it's the bit where he tries to joust with the windmills. He thinks they're giants. This is far from the best or funniest scene in the book; people know about it because it happens early. It's like how everyone knows about the Lilliputians from Gulliver's Travels even though the first section, the section in Lilliput, is the least of that book.

Quixote's friends don't like what he's doing and decide that he's gone crazy and needs to be cured. Their method of curing him is to burn all of his books. Books, see, are bad examples. At least, the books about chivalry that Quixote loves are bad examples, so they decide to remove the source of his illness by burning the books. Of course, before they burn them, they go through them and keep for themselves all of the valuable ones or the ones they just happen to like. It's really pretty horrible.

It's also Cervantes method of dismissing authors he thought were hacks (for lack of a better word) and uplifting authors he admired. Including, or maybe especially, contemporaries.

Look, there's a reason that this book is still considered one of the greatest novels ever written. I wish I hadn't waited so long to get around to it. It's well worth the time even if it does look long.