I just don’t get it; it seemed funny enough for the first few chapters, but began to be repetitive, hammering the same joke and characters until the very last chapter. It’s just a kooky guy doing stupid things, and the dialogue is long-winded to the point that I couldn’t bear to hear the proclamatory style anymore, with another speech about chivalry.
So, did I miss something? Is it just me? It only makes me think novels in general are overrated, especially classic ones, if this is supposed to be the best one of all time.
You missed something. It’s one of the most seminal novels in all literature and it is both highly comical in some places and moving in others. Of course there will be things that you miss, it’s a very complex work and it was written hundreds of years ago. Like any other book it helps if you’re aware of the background, in this case of the chivalric literature that Cervantes is satirizing, but it isn’t necessary.
As for classic novels being overrated that’s simply not so. People didn’t pick these works out of a heap and say we’ll make this one and that one classics. They are classics because over the centuries readers have enjoyed them and continue so to do. If you want to deny yourself Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Emma, Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Pere Goriot, Le Rouge et Le Noir, Vanity Fair, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, War and Peace, etc that’s your business. But I can assure you you’ll be missing out on some of the greatest reading you will ever experience.
My advice would be don’t get discouraged if you can’t get into a work straight away. I remember when I was a teenager and started Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. I couldn’t get into it, the Russian names were confusing and I gave up after a while. A few years later, when my reading had become both broader and deeper, I returned to it and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Yes, things become classics for a reason. But that reason is that they are highly influential on later works. So it’s perfectly possible that later works will have improved upon the classic, even though said later works weren’t classics.
It’s even worse with comedies, for two reasons. The fact that you’ve seen it before reduces the impact of comedy. which thrives on novelty and defying expectations. And comedy is cultural, and you can lose the comedy if you don’t understand the cultural trapping in which something is produced.
I honestly would not go into any classic expecting what you expect out of a modern comedy. Just like you can’t go in expecting modern writing styles. There is going to be a barrier between you and the work that isn’t there in the more modern stuff you are used to. You have to get yourself in the right mindset to get stuff out of it.
I admit, I was unable to enjoy Shakespeare at any level beyond the academic until I saw it in a play form, by a college theater department that brought out all the jokes. I still prefer the Commedia Dell’arte versions of Shakespeare’s comedies.
I also think there are plenty of classics that, while I appreciate what they were doing, and maybe even appreciate the story, but still think the writers were really not all that great. The Scarlet Letter was interesting to read, but I think Hawthorne’s style is awful. And I while I get what The Great Gatsby is going for, I honestly don’t get anything out of it.
There’s this weird elitism where you’re not supposed to just understand old works, but actively enjoy them. But, if we can all have different opinions on modern works, why can’t we on the classics?
I wouldn’t say Don Quixote is the best novel of all time, but it was very influential and I personally love the plot, characters and much of the writing. Which was unique and groundbreaking when written. It does drag on in parts, lacks subtlety and is written in a dated style and another language. Yet it is still a great work of literature, much beloved by many.
Of course you can have opinions but those opinions won’t carry much weight until you’ve actually read them. Have you read any Sterne, Fielding, Stendhal, Eliot, etc? And as for moderns ‘improving’ on the classics that is a totally wrong-headed view of literature. It’s not science, you don’t ‘improve’ on it. Many of the problems people have with the classics is that they are unfamiliar with the style of pre 20th century works and have no inclination to familiarize themselves with it by broadening their reading.
ISTM that’s part of the parody/style mirroring – many of the Novels of Chivalry that drove Quijano delusional would have whoever was the protagonist paladin repeating variations on a theme of heroic feats over and over, especially when you got yourself a “franchise” like Don Q’s fave hero Amadís of Gaula. The plotting is not “tight” because it was not in the works being parodied in that time. The familiar scenes of the dubbing at the inn, the tilting at windmills, the battle of the sheep, the party at the Dukes’ manor, Sancho’s audience as governor of Insula Barataria, are all fun scenes but they are in between an extended narrative that wends its way around several themes and characters, sometimes with whole other side-stories inserted that seem to add little to Quixote’s and Sancho’s progress but make some point the author wishes to convey.
And Q’s proclamatory speeches about chivalry, well, that was also part of the point, the character’s obsession (until he got over it) would lead him to inflict extensive proclamatory discourses on chivalric values on anyone who’d listen and many who’d rather not (and in general having a protagonist pause the action to deliver a long speech is something that has been happening in fiction since before Cervantes and continuing into our own age).
As others have said, canonical classics, especially foundational ones, suffer not just from the language and style and tropes having become unfamiliar but from how what’s in them has become so ingrained into the language of literature and in the general culture that the ways in which they were innovative now seem like nothing special and even backward. But even further than that, foundational canonical classics suffer from that their reputation creates inflated expectations, that this particular piece of writing will kick your butt, you will be pwned and know it and thank the author for it. Newsflash: it doesn’t happen for everyone.
Well, the constant repetition made me stop reading it. I have a low tolerance for it and I figured out it was:
Don Q: that’s X
Sancho: no, it’s Y
Don Q: takes action toward Y, assuming it’s X and gets his ass kicked.
Repeat.
Man of La Mancha managed to distill everything down perfectly (and stands up better because it’s not all dated humor). I can see it as an important work in the history of the novel, but it doesn’t hold up well, mostly because what it’s parodying has been forgotten.
Shakespeare was doing far more advanced work at the same time: better story and far more range.