Don Quixote: Have you ever read this?

[osho]

In my eternal quest for a good novel I have read several in the last 2 months and I have tried some of the best novels of the century to no purpose like Proust' In Search of Lost time. Joyce's Ulysses and I never could finish them, both stopped unfinished, half read. Yet I am again starting another Spanish classic, magnum opus - Don Quixote. I had read it as a child in my native language, the worst translation, inappropriately abridged and diverged from the original one. I still have a faint memory of the original story. Now I am suddenly into this book and I have just read an introductory or review on the book. I just through my cursory reading of this great literary piece found everything really marvelous and the singularity of the novel that startled me at the start is its wild imagination and fancy and as if the story proceeds in defiance of everything man made or man took for granted or it seems to have taken flight far and far from our day-today mundane realisms.

I do not want to talk too much about the novel and let the rest speak out for themselves

[mal4mac]

In my eternal quest for a good novel I have read several in the last 2 months and I have tried some of the best novels of the century to no purpose like Proust' In Search of Lost time. Joyce's Ulysses and I never could finish them, both stopped unfinished, half read. Yet I am again starting another Spanish classic, magnum opus - Don Quixote.

I had the same experience. Don Quixote is a marvellous novel - very funny, very poignant, and not something you have to force yourself through (like Joyce and Proust!) Interesting how some candidates for 'best novel ever' are a (relatively) easy read, but others (Joyce, Proust) are harder to plough through than an advanced text on Quantum Physics.

[Calidore]

I think I read about 1/4 of Don Quixote before giving up. The over-broadness of the humor and the repetitiveness of the situations got boring.

[cafolini]

I think I read about 1/4 of Don Quixote before giving up. The over-broadness of the humor and the repetitiveness of the situations got boring.

I think you might be right. I rather study Quevedo to know something about Spain.

[Helga]

I loved Don Quixote but it did take me a long time to get through it but Proust 'In search of Lost Time' I read in less than a week, one of the best novels I have read. I found it good to read Don Quixote out loud, my son loved it!

[Charles Darnay]

I love Quixote.

Most people just read The first book: everything you know about Don Quixote from popular culture tends to come from the first book. The second book is, in my opinion, the better of the two (though admittedly not as whimsical and funny) - but in total (f you read the 1000 or so page text) - it is a wonderful read.

Some of the songs and poems spread throughout do get a bit repetitive, and I found myself skimming them more or less, but on the whole - very enjoyable.

[cafolini]

I love Quixote.

Most people just read The first book: everything you know about Don Quixote from popular culture tends to come from the first book. The second book is, in my opinion, the better of the two (though admittedly not as whimsical and funny) - but in total (f you read the 1000 or so page text) - it is a wonderful read.

Some of the songs and poems spread throughout do get a bit repetitive, and I found myself skimming them more or less, but on the whole - very enjoyable.

Don Quixote has no Spanish identity. He has no date of birth, no place of birth, and is a work of pure imagination written entirely from a library. It does not contribute to any knowledge of the Spanish history apart from a mockery of reduced currents of decadent knights, highly exaggerated and a Protagoric sophistry of ethics made for madness. Yet, as a fantasy, it could be enjoyed.

[Charles Darnay]

Don Quixote has no Spanish identity. He has no date of birth, no place of birth, and is a work of pure imagination written entirely from a library. It does not contribute to any knowledge of the Spanish history apart from a mockery of reduced currents of decadent knights, highly exaggerated and a Protagoric sophistry of ethics made for madness. Yet, as a fantasy, it could be enjoyed.

As I am not familiar with Spanish identity, I will have to take your word on this.

From an English lit. standpoint - Don Quixote is a pivotal work in the Romance/satire of Romance genre, the development of the picaresque and sentimentalism that flourished in the 17th-18th century - as well (considering book 2) a great foreshadow for what would become postmodern traditions. There is a reason why Borges chose Quixote for Pierre Menard: Quixote has built into it a self-referential, meta-literary quality.

[cafolini]

As I am not familiar with Spanish identity, I will have to take your word on this.

From an English lit. standpoint - Don Quixote is a pivotal work in the Romance/satire of Romance genre, the development of the picaresque and sentimentalism that flourished in the 17th-18th century - as well (considering book 2) a great foreshadow for what would become postmodern traditions. There is a reason why Borges chose Quixote for Pierre Menard: Quixote has built into it a self-referential, meta-literary quality.

I would have to agree with you on this. After much flirting around with modernism, impossible tango investigations, and defiance of the creole, finally Borges settles and makes it his aspiration to reveal the fiction of fiction, the beginning of postmodern thought in Argentinean literature. His Quixote seeks identity above all. But where? In a world of disconnected parallels he eventually leaves alone. As time goes on, he doesn't even wish to see himself as a thinker or a moralist. In the end, he's simply a man of letters speaking about the philosophical systems of confusion. A big change from the anticreole that Roberto Arlit was forced to make fun off as an Argentinean academist. I might be saying too much but I think J. L. never accepted until much later in life that he had eventually been molded by Macedonio Fernandez into an unexpected first rate humorist.