Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

I bought this last fall (same time as Red Dwarf), but decided to save it until I'd read everything else I had, because it was clearly going to take a while.

So, this edition is based on the Smollet translation, from some point in the 1700s. There are numerous footnotes, either explaining names and places Cervantes uses, Biblical references, or spots where Smollet paraphrased what a character said. Some times he does it to maintain a rhyme scheme Cervantes had, other times he seems more interested in preserving the meaning of the statement, if not the precise wording. Certain proverbs don't span national borders, apparently.

It is, as I expected, a wordy book. Don't say it in 10 words, if you can say it in 70. Because it's a story about a man taken up with stories of knights-errant, it contains all the exaggeration you'd expect from those books (I assume). When Sancho gets roughed up, he's bruised and bludgeoned from head to toe. Every young woman or man is the most beautiful any of those present have ever beheld (which becomes complicated when there's three young maidens around at the moment.) People can't simply enjoy a story, they have to take infinite satisfaction from the tale. Even if it's a tale about a young woman fleeing her home in disgrace because she let some guy sweet talk his way into her bed with promises of marriage. Really doesn't seem like something you should enjoy hearing, but maybe people in 1600s Spain were just huge assholes.

I did not realize Cervantes wrote two books of Don Quixote's adventures, both of which are collected here, or that the characters are aware of the first book during the second book. As in, the second book begins with a young scholar returning to town and telling Quixote and Sancho all about this book.

This factors into the difference in how the books proceed. Much of the first book, which contains two separate times Don Quixote sets out in search of adventures, is focused on him misinterpreting everything he sees in terms of the stories of knights-errant he loves. The time he sees windmills and decides they are a horde of giants being the most well-known example. Every inn is a castle, a herd of sheep is really a huge battle. That they don't appear so to Sancho is the work of those dastardly enchanters.

In the second book, because Cervantes has established that Don Quixote's adventures are well-known and loved even outside Spain, trades on this (in-story, the story has been written by one Cidi Hamete, not Cervantes). The knight loves to boldly announce himself, and so the people he meets are quite excited to encounter a celebrity, and frequently willing to play along with his delusions. A large chunk of the second book is taken up with a duke and duchess who entertain themselves for a solid two weeks setting things up to get Don Quixote wound up so they can have a good laugh.

I'm not sure if Cervantes intended to demonstrate the utter uselessness of the aristocracy, but showing that these people have got nothing better to do than pull elaborate pranks on an old man with dementia is pretty strong evidence. I'm not clear why every man of the cloth in both stories is so opposed to both Don Quixote's actions, and books on chivalry in general. I'm assuming Cervantes is toeing a line established by the Inquisition, I just don't know what the Church had against such books. I guess they don't want people to get any ideas about going and doing things to address injustices. Leave that to the Church. It'll get to it, you know, eventually.

He does the same when it comes to the King having decreed that all the Moors had to leave Spain, even if they'd converted to Christianity. An acquaintance of Sancho's they cross paths with, who had converted, and loves Spain, agrees the King was right to do so, because so many of his brethren could not be trusted. OK, sure.

Either way, it's interesting how easily most people Quixote and Sancho meet along the way fall into their madness. Some people are playing along to amuse themselves, but in the first book, it's more common that they're simply being polite, or that they don't see the point in disputing it. If this old man wants to claim the inn is a tavern, the innkeeper doesn't care (until Quixote chops up a bunch of wine skins, claiming they were the heads of giants besieging him.)

One other thing that plays into the second book is that, between Cervantes publishing his two books, someone else wrote a book about Don Quixote, without Cervantes' permission. So several references are made to it during Cervantes' second book, all disparaging. Both Quixote and Sancho are dismayed by how they're presented in, and the fact that it misrepresents their adventures. Everyone they meet that has read this libelous manuscript agrees that it has not captured their true personalities.

The next time I get annoyed at Jim Starlin for writing yet another Thanos story that goes out of its way to dismiss every story anyone else wrote with Thanos since the last time Starlin did it, I'll just have to remind myself that Miguel de Cervantes did it first.

'"That discourse, replied the peasant, puts me in the mind of those books which treat of knights-errant, who were commonly distinguished by such titles as you bestow on that man: but, I suppose you are pleased to be merry, or else, the bed chambers of this poor gentleman's skull are but scantily furnished."

"You are a most impudent rascal! (cried the knight, overhearing what he said) it is your skull that is unfurnished and shrunken; but mine is more pregnant than the abominable whore that brought you forth." So saying, he snatched up a loaf, and flung it at the goatherd with such fury, that he levelled his nose with his face.'