Don Quixote

Don’t make promises you know you won’t keep.

I really expected to enjoy this book. I mean, a second chance royal bodyguard fantasy romance with political intrigue and magic? Sounds right up my alley! But alas, in practice... th book and I, we never really clicked. I continue to like the idea of it, but I was disappointed by the execution.

The worldbuilding is full of promise and interesting ideas, but it's hard to pull them together into a coherent picture because the author kept swinging between two extremes when delivering all those details. Either there were endless boring infodumps, or it was just, you know, pages of characters carrying on in their world without explaining anything. I vastly prefer the second approach when it's done right, but here, it just... wasn't. Like, I still have no idea what a Prime Paladin even is. Is it the King's special personal bodyguard who's supposed to be at the King's side at all times? But Balen wasn't that. Is it someone who has some sort of special authority over other Paladins? Balen wasn't that either. He often deferred to Lestr and whatever authority he sometimes displayed when interacting with his brethren seemed to come more from his personality, skills, and pre-established relationships with them.

The prose felt as uneven and swingy as the worldbuilding: too sparse sometimes, then too convoluted. The characters were rather flat. At the beginning, I was intrigued by Zavrius and by his relationship with Balen, but then for the longest time, these two were just stuck in some kind of limbo, never making any progress. I wish I knew more about their backstories, like the details of their past relationship and also just the details of their individual pasts. A few flashback chapters/scenes would have gone a long way. Oh, and while I'm on the subject of characters: there are LOTS of named characters in the book, but we only really get to know 4-5 of them, including the main duo. And with the somewhat rocky pacing, it wasn't always clear which characters meant something and would have at least some shining moments down the line and which characters were basically decorations. Come to think of it, the same issue is present with the worldbuilding: with the way it was delivered, it was often hard to tell what was meaningful and what was flavor (a lot of it was flavor), so that made it hard to keep my focus.

As for the plot, most of the stars I'm giving this book have been earned by the political intrigues and mysteries that held a lot of promise. I just, once again, wish they were executed better. And I also wish the characters made smarter choices in relation to them, or suffered harder consequences for some of the... not-so-smart things they did.

Don Quixote is a staple in western literature, it ushered in the golden age of Spanish literature and it is also is one of the earliest examples of the modern (canonical) novel. The novel tells the story of a Spanish nobleman (Hidalgo) obsessed with the chivalric romance literature of the middle ages, who sets out to try and revive chivalry. With his trusty squire Sancho Panza, he sets out on an adventure to undo all the wrongs and injustices he encounters in the world. Claiming to be a knight. he gives himself the name Don Quixote of La Mancha.

From the very start, we get a sense that maybe Don Quixote is crazy. In psychology the term Quixotism relates to “over-idealism” and is often used in reference to someone with a naïve romanticism towards utopianism. The term “tilting at windmills” refers to a scene near the beginning of the novel where Don Quixote races off to fight giants that were actually windmills. If you consider that Don Quixote went mad from all the books he was reading and set off to try and fix the world, then this could be used as a metaphor towards Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra own feeling toward the same books, but rather than fixing the world he wrote Don Quixote. This brings to mind the quote from Toni Morrison “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Don Quixote, like many books of the time, was read to children; this is a novel I could never imagine being read to any child now. However one thing that makes this novel so great is that there are so many interpretations to be taken from the text. Harold Bloom (who wrote the introduction to my copy of the book) calls this a work of radical nihilism and anarchy, in the way it glorifies fantasy over reality. Calling him the Sorrowful Knight whose objective is that “He is at war with Freud’s reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying.” The translator of the edition I read, Edith Grossman, has said, “When I first started reading the Quixote I thought it was the most tragic book in the world, and I would read it and weep”. However when she worked on the translation she remembered “sitting at my computer and laughing out loud.”

After the French Revolution a popular interpretation of the novel was that it was about ethics and righting the wrongs of society. While later on it was a social commentary which always lead to the discussion of whose side Cervantes was on. You could even pull some religious or feminist themes out of this novel but for me, I read this as a Marxist text. The relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza was a good representation of the class struggle. It is evident that Quixote needed Sancho Panza more than Panza needed him. Sancho Panza was there to rise the ranks of society while Don Quixote was be completely lost without his squire.

I cannot talk about Don Quixote without mentioning the way that Miguel de Cervantes played with intertextuality. This novel is split into two parts; the first part was originally published in 1605. In 1614 a second volume was released by an anonymous author. It is believed that Miguel de Cervantes started writing his second part after this and in 1615 it was released. While part one was a spoof of the literature that annoyed him, part two was more an attack on this unauthorised story of Don Quixote. It even made references to this scandal as Don Quixote explores the concept of someone writing about him.

This is the type of novel that deserves to be read again and again. Every reading will probably offer something different and this review is a reference point of what I got out of reading this book the first time around. If you get the chance, I recommend reading this with someone. I read this with Hilary from Yrrobotfriend and the discussions were the best part of this reading experience. While reading this novel I enjoyed part one the most but on reflection, I think part two offers more.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/classic/don-quixote-miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra/