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xider 's review for:
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Now this brick of a book took years for me to finish, and I don't know where to even start reviewing it. Don Quixote was forever a dream book for me to read because of its almost unique status as a classic and respected comedy, which, unfortunately, you really don't get often. And there are many things that I appreciated, laughed/snickered at, and found deeply profound, but this came at a cost of one of the longest and repetitive books I've ever read with too many episodic elements.
It's so long that it was written in two parts, and you can definitely tell - the playful narrative devices of intermixing fiction and authorship in the second part elevate this story to another hilarious level. That is also easily my favourite part of the whole story as characters from the fake second part start appearing in the actual one, denouncing the fake one's characters' traits and "poor writing style". But the first part is a slog to get through - it's very episodic, and the duo seem to grow very little as characters. If I could, I'd give the second part 5 stars and the first part 3, especially because of the many inner stories that make it feel more like The Decameron or The Canterbury Tale than the first modern novel (guess Cervantes learnt his lesson from criticism on the first part).
The characters are fascinating, Don Quixote's long and eloquent speeches and Sancho's stringing of one similar after another are hilarious to listen to when narrated by the masterful Kayvan Novak in the audiobook (which I would recommend to get through this in a more entertaining manner, only switched to it 90% of the way through). And their relationship to the outside world changes beautifully. As they become less fools of themselves and more made fools by cruel others, the Goodreads review written by Lisa stuck to me more and more by changing my view of the two happy go lucky idiots and made me think of them as paragons of seeing, as Anaïs Mitchell puts it in Hadestown, "how the world could be in spite of the way that it is". It's a wonderful concept and I love how it changes the interpretation of this book.
There are so many really well crafted elements in the language of both the original and the translation, especially with Don Quixote's archaic speech and Sancho's idioms that it really takes your breath away, and you're able to appreciate it from the translator's explanation at the end of the audiobook.
It's taken a while, but I don't regret reading it and would recommend it to anyone vaguely interested in this sort of thing.
It's so long that it was written in two parts, and you can definitely tell - the playful narrative devices of intermixing fiction and authorship in the second part elevate this story to another hilarious level. That is also easily my favourite part of the whole story as characters from the fake second part start appearing in the actual one, denouncing the fake one's characters' traits and "poor writing style". But the first part is a slog to get through - it's very episodic, and the duo seem to grow very little as characters. If I could, I'd give the second part 5 stars and the first part 3, especially because of the many inner stories that make it feel more like The Decameron or The Canterbury Tale than the first modern novel (guess Cervantes learnt his lesson from criticism on the first part).
The characters are fascinating, Don Quixote's long and eloquent speeches and Sancho's stringing of one similar after another are hilarious to listen to when narrated by the masterful Kayvan Novak in the audiobook (which I would recommend to get through this in a more entertaining manner, only switched to it 90% of the way through). And their relationship to the outside world changes beautifully. As they become less fools of themselves and more made fools by cruel others, the Goodreads review written by Lisa stuck to me more and more by changing my view of the two happy go lucky idiots and made me think of them as paragons of seeing, as Anaïs Mitchell puts it in Hadestown, "how the world could be in spite of the way that it is". It's a wonderful concept and I love how it changes the interpretation of this book.
There are so many really well crafted elements in the language of both the original and the translation, especially with Don Quixote's archaic speech and Sancho's idioms that it really takes your breath away, and you're able to appreciate it from the translator's explanation at the end of the audiobook.
It's taken a while, but I don't regret reading it and would recommend it to anyone vaguely interested in this sort of thing.