I recently finished reading Don Quixote. I figured it's supposed to be the greatest novel ever written, it might be worth my time to read it.
I liked it a lot, actually. It was pretty funny, and much more modern than I had anticipated. There was a lot of winking at the reader, at least in Part II. Another thing that surprised me was finding the hangman paradox in the book. That's the paradox where a judge questions each traveler over a bridge, and if they answer truthfully where they are going, they are allowed to pass. If they lie, they are hanged. This works fine until one day, a traveler tells the judge, "I am going to be hanged". Pity poor Sancho Panza, who had to figure out whether to let this guy live or not.
There's a lot of very clever stuff in this book. I'm sure it would have been even more enjoyable if I had read more books of chivalry. It struck me at how similar those tales were to modern superhero comics. According to a passage in the book, every knight had a certain special talent, such as the ability to resist enchantment, or some sort of invulnerability.
I also thought about how both Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam had famously tried to film the book, and both never could do it (well, couldn't do it yet in the case of Gilliam). Due to the structure of the book, and it's length, it's hard to see how any sort of coherent plot could be filmed.
One bad part of the book, however, is the ending. Cervantes spends way too much time and effort on decrying the Don Quixote knock-off that appeared before he could publish Part II himself. In the book this appears because Don Quixote finds out about this knock-off, and it describes a bunch of things he never did. Cervantes goes on and on about this, even to the very end of the book. I guess I'd be pretty pissed too, though.
One final thought about the book. I don't know for sure, but I think Cervantes had a shepherdess fetish.
Posted by ahyatt at January 25, 2004 08:17 AM