Adventures in Reading: Don Quixote, finished at last

Cervantes, Don Quixote
The "read a book in three months, more or less" strategy has worked again. I have come to appreciate its virtues, which are more than I expected. It works best for long novels with chapters of a similar length, and it works by mitigating a lot of the excesses that older novels, in particular, seem to be prone to. Maybe ten years ago I tried to re-read War and Peace and failed 500 pages in because it was too rich--my analogy at the time was that it was like eating prime rib every day but only prime rib. When the book is one of four I'm reading and the daily page count is limited, that problem goes away. I would've abandoned Don Quixote in Part I when it becomes clear that Cervantes is just sticking in unrelated stories to pad the page count (something he raises as a possibility in Part II!), but it's fifteen or so minutes for a classic of world literature, might as well stick around. Next up will likely be Middlemarch, a book that I read at the wrong time of my life and where my re-reading attempts constantly get stuck at Dorothea ruining part of her life right at the beginning of the book. But the worst of that will be over in a week or so.

It's not surprising that this works--it's reflective of the environment that at least some of these books were written in and matches the way they were intended? to be read, or perhaps just were read. But as a voracious reader who once would crush 500 pages in a day like it was nothing, it's new to me, and a bit more sustainable. But onto the book itself.

Y'all, it was not great. Part I has all the bits you already know and love at the beginning and then a bunch of unrelated stories with Don Quixote, Sancho and whoever else is with them just happening to run into the people those unrelated stories are about. Less happens in Part II, where a lot of the action is taken up by people who loved Part I and are somewhat cruelly trying to make Don Quixote produce stunts for their own amusement. But Part II does have a metafictional aspect that's not unpleasant--Cervantes is clearly annoyed by the spurious Part IIs running around, plays more with the idea of the author of the actual history as an actual person, and definitively kills his character so that there can be no more. Perhaps more metafictional still: the duke and duchess who waylay Don Quixote and Sancho might just be representations of the reader, who care more about getting additional story than whether it rings true or not--who in fact know that none of what's happening is real--and are perfectly happy to torture the characters to get more of them. But writers have been complaining about their readers for a long time, and I have seen many instances of it, and so there's no novelty here.

And yet for all of this you can see why it became a touchstone for Spanish literature. Some of it is the monumental size, but mostly that the story is central but not really what the book is about--the tropes and stories become a fixed launching point for the margins, the asides, the control of the author. It's not difficult to follow this into prominent narrators, found or recalled stories, the blending of fact and fiction, and the occasional deus ex machina that is in everything from Soldiers of Salamis to Your Face Tomorrow to 2666, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Allende, and on and on. It's a book in which everything is already there, waiting to be picked up; it's hard to argue that any book has been picked up by so many people so effectively.