I bought a copy of Moby Dick at a garage sale last year and when I got home and opened it found it was a German translation.

I read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky when I was at high school. I didn't understand it but found it fascinating to enter the Russian mindworld. Recently I read that The Brothers Karamazov includes a prosecution of Christ. Literature contains inventive ideas that you often don't fully get at the time you read them.

I'm up to chapter nine of part two in Don Quixote. Cervantes is a master at drawing the reader into the plot. The story when Sancho buys curds and puts them in Don Quixote's helmet, who puts it on his head, is a scream, so is Lady Dulcinea stinking of raw garlic. Cervantes inhabits the opposite-land of satire and irony, so you can bet for everything he says the opposite is true. I didn't believe him when he said the comment that the book is satire is not true. The elaborate praise of anything in Don Quixote suggests that Cervantes regards it with mockery and derision. As he explains with his several mentions of clerical censorship, his foremost duty was to provide a book of popular entertainment with no chance of condemnation for sedition. Like his wily old knight of sorrows, Cervantes keeps secrets from possible enemies. Just as Don Quixote conceals the timing of his next sally into knight errantry from his housekeeper and niece, Cervantes allows the reader to draw conclusions that he could not possibly state himself in a popular work of fiction.

I'm finished with the book now, too. I'm left wondering a couple of things, first of all, about translation. I read my old J. M. Cohen 1952 translation. It seemed appropriately colloquial to me, but the Grossman translation got such high marks from readers, that I wonder if reading hers would have increased my enjoyment. I don't plan to read the book again, but if I did, it would have to be another edition. Mine disintegrated as I read, many of the pages falling out, so that by the end the book was much shorter. The other matter relating to translation we touched on at the beginning, and that was whether English readers could ever have the pleasure that Spanish speakers have with the book. Or maybe even Spanish speakers would need to know an older Castillian dialect to savor its verbal treasures.

Toward the end (p. 871) I came across an unusual passage in which a man from the crowd delivers a harsh judgment on Don Quixote, not simply for his madness but for the harm he has done. It's a perspective we haven't seen earlier, and I wonder whether in some way Cervantes is preparing us for how he is to write the ending, which is a full retraction by Don Q.
"The devil take Don Quixote de la Mancha! How have you got here alive after all the beatings you've received? You're a madman. If you had been mad in private and behind closed doors you would have done less harm. But you have the knack of turning everyone who has to do with you into madmen and dolts. Just look at these gentlemen riding with you! Go back home, idiot, and look after your estate and your wife and children, and quit this nonsense that worm-eats your brain and skims the cream off your intellect."

There will probably be some more discussion of the ending. Bleachededen is right, I think, about Cervantes resolving to put an end to copycat writers, but I'm not sure that his having the Don retract everything is completely due to that objective. For me, the ending is not inconsistent with the rest in terms of the judgment it renders on Don Q's mad obsession. I don't think Cervantes really betrays his comic hero here. In giving him the name Alonso Quixano the Good, Cervantes doesn't endorse as constructive, noble, or good Don Q's former incarnation of knight errant, which also doesn't contradict his attitude throughout the book. I don't find the ending a very satisfying one, though. It's a bit heavy-handed and seems to be serving Cervantes' personal agenda more than it does the story itself.

I harp on the subject, but the narrative twists & turns seem to me the most interesting aspect of the book. In the last 50 pages we saw how fiction--the false history of the Aragonese writer--changes reality--or maybe the "true" fiction--when Don Q. decides not to go to Saragossa just because the Aragonese writer had him going there. And then the Don and Sancho change the fictional landscape, in a sense, when they publish the affadavit declaring Part two to be only a fiction. I suppose Cervantes was writing before narrative conventions were so fixed; either that or he was an innovator well ahead of his time.

Finally, I remember a professor telling my freshman European Lit class about a critic who asserted that people who found profundities beneath the surface of the novel were fooling themselves. What you see is basically what you have, he said. I say this only to emphasize that the differences evident between readers taking part in this forum are nothing new.

DWill said:
I suppose Cervantes was writing before narrative conventions were so fixed; either that or he was an innovator well ahead of his time.

I doubt I will ever reach Part II of this rather ponderous book but I have been thinking of Cervantes as a literary innovator, perhaps even as a post-modernist, if that’s possible. He does push the boundaries of modern narrative – or maybe he is setting the boundaries but just a long way out there.

I haven't gotten as far as you, eden (how dare you pass me up? I got distracted by The Magic Mountain, not realizing there were speed readers out here) but I can tell you that when I left off with the book I was struck by how Shakespearean-farcelike the situations were becoming what with crazy plots involving people dressing up as other people and conspiring among themselves via wild untruths in order to convince Don Quixote to come back to the La Mancha area under the impressions that somehow they were going to cure him of his madness.

To address another post you made, I found that I got bogged down for a time before this point with the florid descriptions and language that occured as the virginal maiden (don't have her name at hand) told her story. I think this kind of writing was just a conditional part of the style in Cervantes' place and time. I like more direct writing myself, and was glad when the action picked up. I do know that the second part is referred to widely as "more rhetorical" than the first, so we may all be in for some trouble here! LOL

Tom

bleachededen wrote:I have a question for anyone who has read as far into Part II as I have, or who has at least read enough to know about Sanson Carrasco and his intentions.

My question is this:
Is it any less "mad" for Sanson Carrasco to dress as a knight and challenge Don Quixote to single combat in order to cure him, than it is for Don Quixote to believe in his fantastical world of knight errantry? When does the "curer" become more mad than the "diseased?" In that same line of thinking, are those who go out of their way to trick Don Quixote only for their amusement, like the duke and the duchess and Don Antonio, any saner than the "mad" knight? Are they more sane for recognizing that what they do is trickery, or is Don Quixote more honest and noble than they are because he, at least, believes that what he says and does is true, and is not out to trick or harm anyone?

I've been grappling with these questions for some time now, and I'd love to hear what other readers and thinkers have to say about these confusing issues.

I am a speed reader. Can't be helped. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I, on the other, hand, sometimes don't get to what I'm reading until I'm done with my second job and/or playing guitar in the evening and then sometimes only a few pages before I start nodding. My best time is during lunch and weekends. Being a busy guy is a terrible thing.

The Magic Mountain was a bit ponderous at times, but I did want to read it through. I'm glad I did.