I’ve got plenty of time on my hands, do I give it another shot? I’ve got the Penguin Classics edition translation by John Rutherford. It’s over 1000 pages so it’s got to be unabridged. I’ve read excerpts in Spanish class in high school and I’ve seen Man of La Mancha so I know the plot basics. If I start it this time, I’ve got to finish it.
I read it and re-read it years and years ago and I remember liking it quite a bit. On the other hand, my literary friend (now deceased) did not like it but we had opposite taste in almost everything except cats, dogs and the ocean. She was a big Russian literature fan, books of which I personally find depressing and mostly unreadable.
Anyway, I remember Don Quixote as quite cleverly written, funny and full of symbolism. Perhaps I was just projecting on that last one though.
Is there a version with analysis notes? That might make it more rewarding.
Don Quixote is awesome. I agree that a good edition for you will have useful notes about Cervantes and about the text and language.
I remember liking it when I read it as a teenager; some parts were quite funny. I think I’d probably appreciate it even more now because my reading tastes have drifted towards historical literature.
Alonso Quixano sure liked historical literature.
I started reading it and had to give up. Too repetitious.
I wasn’t able to get through it, but I suspect that that may just have been the translation I had (sorry, I don’t remember which translation it was).
I found the first part of the novel uproarious (what we read today was actually published as two separate works a decade apart) but the second, where the Don’s fantasy of heroism is stripped from him quite tragic. There are various interpretations of this and it is as much a reflection of the reader as the work itself as to which one adopts. I read the Grossman translation which was recommended to me as the best English translation but I don’t recall more annotation than a forward and the occasional footnote.
I have never seen the musical or film (other than the documentary of Terry Gilliam’s failed attempts to make a quasi-adaptation of it prior to the 2018 release of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote) but I cannot imagine a y film capturing the humor and complexity of the novel any more than either adaptation of Catch-22 did credit to that work, and for much the same reason.
Stranger
I read it the summer after college, and I enjoyed it.
My vote is “give it a try”. If you don’t enjoy the first 50 or 100 pages, then quit.
I thought it was pretty funny. It helped that I read an annotated version.
Indeed. You really would need a major HBO-type season-long series.
The reader of Don Quijote will often find himself in the middle of a long separate parenthetical story or discourse before coming back to the main thread. It was the nature of the work in great part because it was also the structure of those from which it was inspired. The “first part” was created as a parody-with-social-comment of the Novelas de Caballerías – Chivalry Epics that were popular in the prior century and that along that period had grown into multivolume series that had become formulaic, bloated and repetitive even for fantasy (there is even a chapter in the book where Quijano’s library is being purged, and Cervantes takes advantage, through the characters, to give his reviews of which ones were worth preserving or not.) From it we get the popular image of how Quijano decides to live as knight-errant Quixote in his very mundane, pedestrian rural province, with ridiculous effects.
For the second part, Cervantes uses the trick of having it recognized in-universe that both the first part and an unauthorized sequel have been published (to don Quixote’s dismay as he sees himself badly portrayed especially in the faux sequel), so the story gets deeper into what this means for the characters, who partly trying to undo these misrepresentations now travel further beyond their countryside seeing different locations, ways and institutions and people from more different classes of society, where the interactions are not as kind to noble folly (but where those who would mock or abuse them are still contrasted with the honest madness of Quijano and the honest peasant ways of Sancho).
Everyone should read Don Quixote.
I have been for the past forty years. Newest version is on my Kindle.
I read it about twenty years ago in a well-readable German translation that was heavily annotated, and I enjoyed it very much. Without annotations, I doubt that I’d have made it through four volumes though.
Anecdote I read in an omnibus S.J. Perelman collection some thirty-two years ago:
Some time back in the Fifties, a movie producer (I wanna say Mike Todd) flew Perelman out to Palm Springs to hobnob and maybe offer him screenwriting gig. So they’re sitting around the pool, and the issue arises that the producer would like Perelman to adapt Don Quixote for the screen. He asks for Sid’s opinion of the book, to which Perelman responds: “Don Quixote is the most famous book no one has ever read all the way through.”
This put an end to the Palm Springs junket.
To the OP: that’s the edition I have (just managed to dig it out of my bookshelf to check), I managed to get through it all some years ago. I’d recommend reading the introductory notes before starting, as they set the scene well, and there are a good number of annotations you can refer to throughout the novel.
Personally I found the book and its notes very readable - I haven’t read any other versions, but I’d say it’s a good translation. I enjoyed the comedy and the tragedy, and overall found it much easier going than Wuthering Heights, which I started and failed to finish twice before finally managing to complete it last year (without greatly enjoying any part of it).
Yup, me too. This book gives new meaning to the word redundant.