Don Quixote: A One-Joke Story That Didn’t Need a Sequel

As part of my retirement journey through the “world-books educated people should read,” I took a break from the serious, introspective Russians for what I expected would be lighter fare: Don Quixote (DQ).

Like a lot of famous literature, DQ has seeped into public consciousness in simplified form: the crazy guy tilting at windmills with his sidekick Sancho Panza. That image is in the book, but that modern shorthand owes more to musical and movie Man of La Mancha and “The Impossible Dream” than to the novel itself (the musical is a derivative of DQ, not the actual story). The actual novel is two books, published ten years apart, and usually presented together.

Here’s what I expected and what I found.

• It’s about a crazy guy tilting at windmills. Sort of. The famous episode happens, but it’s brief. The real premise is that Quixote reads so many chivalric romances he loses his grip on reality and sets out as a knight-errant to perform great deeds and win an idealized woman. Think of a modern person so deep into online content that they can't distinguish content from reality.  That's Don Quixote. 

What surprised me was how meta Cervantes gets. When Quixote’s friends try to cure his craziness by burning his library, they review real books of the period, including Cervantes’s own, and criticize them. In Part 2, the first book has been published inside the fictional world, so the characters meet people who have read about them and discuss their own literary fame. For a novel written four hundred years ago, that felt surprisingly modern.

• It’ll be translated from archaic Spanish into archaic English. Nope. Edith Grossman’s translation, with its footnotes, is outstanding. The prose feels natural and modern, and the notes explain the history and literary jokes. If you’re going to read DQ, this is the version I’d recommend.

• It’s long. Yes, and this is my biggest complaint. The two parts (at over 700 pages) amount to a one-joke story that eventually loses steam. Cervantes has a central comic premise: Quixote doing crazy things to which Sancho makes earthy, often malapropistic comments that are funny yet insightful. He keeps varying it until the joke wears thin. 
  Critics often call Part 2 a deeper look at their relationship, with Sancho growing beyond the straight-man role. I can see that, but I got bored, so rushed through large chunks of Part 2. If you want to try DQ, my recommendation is to read the first part and then decide whether you want more. For me the sequel was more than I needed.

• Four hundred years ago will feel like ancient history. Not really. Cervantes was writing in the early seventeenth century, around Shakespeare’s time, but the book reads like normal people dealing with the problems of their day: wars, political instability, piracy. The translation and footnotes help, and the human condition underneath feels familiar.

• Cervantes Takes Too Many Side Quests. The first part contains novella “stories within the story” that temporarily leave Quixote and Sancho behind. Readers have complained about these diversions since Part 1 was published, and Cervantes himself acknowledges their criticism in the sequel when characters discuss the reception of the first book.

I found the inserted stories interesting, and they provided a welcome change of pace from the central routine of Quixote's delusions and their consequences.

So, is Don Quixote a Great Book?

From a historical standpoint as the “first modern novel”, yes, especially with the meta commentary and experimentation that anticipated later styles. I found Sancho’s muddled wisdom amusing and there are several laugh-out-loud scenes (like Quixote attacking a puppet show, convinced the little figurines are real people in need of rescue). So the main story is funny, surprisingly contemporary, and remarkably self-aware, but it gave me more laughs than deep things to think about.

I still prefer the intellectual and spiritual depth of the Russian Greats I’ve been reading, so I’d rank DQ much lower on the list of “Great Books” versus professional scholars who often put it in the top ten.

“Apocalypse Now” Is Not Joseph Conrad

Few people know of Joseph Conrad these days, and if someone remembers anything vaguely about him, it is probably that his novella Heart of Darkness was the inspiration for the movie Apocalypse Now.

I was in my early 50s before I read Heart myself. My kid was assigned it in high-school lit, and I picked it up after the assignment was complete and it was unceremoniously discarded on the living-room bookshelf.

“Narrow read,” I thought. “This will take no time.  Interesting to see how it matches the movie.”

It didn’t.  The movie is, let’s say, remotely related to the book, rather like how the movie Clueless is based on Austen’s Emma (sure, if you say so.)

But the bigger surprise was that Conrad’s prose was simply astounding, and requires careful reading to digest properly. Like a big porterhouse, you have to take small bites - chew, swallow, clear the palate - before taking the next bite, both to savor the flavor and to be able to digest it.

That slim read took longer than I thought, as I both savored the reading and its digestion.

Enjoying the novella so much, I just circled around to read Conrad’s full-length novel, published in 1900, Lord Jim.

Again, the prose is amazing. It is layered, almost poetic, and requires a deliberate reading pace, often requiring you to go back and reread previous paragraphs to get the full meaning.

For example, here is a passage:

He became first mate…without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.

That sentence is difficult not because of the vocabulary, which is ordinary. It’s difficult because Conrad makes you hold the whole grammatical structure in your head while he keeps adding additional layers.

It starts simply enough:

“...without ever having been tested by those events of the sea...”

And then he tells you what those events reveal:

“...that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man...”

Then he keeps digging:

“the edge of his temper”

“the fibre of his stuff”

“the quality of his resistance”

And then deeper still:

“the secret truth of his pretences”

And finally:

“not only to others but also to himself.”

That last clause shifts the message from whether a man is brave or cowardly as he is tested by the sea to whether his conception of himself is actually true.

Now, this sort of reading isn’t for everyone in 21st-century TikTok world. Some of Lord Jim required reading the next page, going back and reading the previous one, then continuing from where I’d left off, a sort of two pages forward, one page back. That isn’t for everyone.

But the amazing prose, combined with themes of guilt, shame, redemption and self-definition, is wrapped inside an incredibly interesting South Pacific adventure story. And underneath it all is  Conrad’s question of how well a man can really know himself, and what happens when reality doesn't match the person he thought he was.

In the end, I recommend experiencing Conrad sometime in your life, Hear of Darkness the appetizer for someone who isn't sure they want the whole steak, Lord Jim for the full meal, if you're willing to take the time to savor it.