Continuing my reading or re-reading of the great works of fiction, at least great according to some sources, I read Don Quixote by Cervantes in the Penguin Classics paperback, translated by Briggs, all 980 some pages of it. I am determined to plow through these long books, with War and Peace likely up next. Don Quixote is mildly entertaining, and Cervantes at times displays a sly sense of humor. But the essential gag is highly repetitive and the novel has no real plot or character development and few situations designed to reveal human emotion and behavior in all its complexity.
The premise is that a gentleman in Spain reads far too many books on chivalry and knights and becomes delusional about his own ability to be a “knight errant” wandering the land doing good for those who are oppressed in some way. The novel has two parts, written years apart. After the first part gained some poppulaity, an author other than Cervantes purported to write a Part II, and then Cervantes responded by authoring his own Part II, which he likely intended to write all along using it to criticize and belittle the usurper. In the initial chapters, Quixote, accompanied by his “squire” a peasant from his village, has a serious of “adventures”, really mishaps, in which he hopes to demonstrate his excellence as a knight, all of which are a figment of his deluded imagination.
In the second part, Quixote encounters people who have read of his earlier adventures and find he and his squire highly entertaining, so they create a variety of new “adventures” to enjoy his delusional state. There are occasional diversions, small essays, on proper behavior in certain situations. But much of the underlying action is repetitive. At the very end of the novel, as Quixote is dying, he renounces his delusion and condemns all those chivalry books. It appears that Cervantes had some particular grudge against those works and what they represented. Read it if you want, I managed to persist to the end without too much pain, but it is not worthy of being compared to a Les Miserables, or many other great novels.
