Rating:

“Until death it is all life”

Author: Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

Middle-aged Alonso Quixano is bored. He is tired of the average life, the average person, the lack of grand gestures and romantic sacrifices. He has spent his life reading one chivalric adventure after another, and while madness lies in fiction, so does glory and adventure. And so, he becomes a madman and sets out to be knighted Don Quixote de la Mancha, a brave knight-errant beset by sorceresses who stays loyal to his unattainable ladylove and fights against injustice and evil. Along the way, our dreamy madman gains himself a squire, the simple peasant Sancho Panza, who is half fool, half realist. And so, the deranged nobleman and the wily peasant set off into the world to seek adventure of their own conjuring. If the world will not be magical and romantic, they shall make it so, however many wizards in the guise of innkeepers and mule riders they must fight, however many bands of travelers and monks they must besiege, however many sheep and windmills they must slaughter.

Often seen as the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a rollicking, episodic comedy that combines sarcasm and wordplay to create a world where we almost want to join our beleaguered hero in his imaginative and amiable insanity. Perhaps the way Quixote sees adventure in the world, perhaps the way he almost deliberately transforms fact into fiction, is the greatest magic of all, a turn that lends itself to comedic effect, half-slapstick and half social commentary; but perhaps it is also testament to the stultifying mundanity of practicality and seeing things by the lowest common denominator, as they are, not as they could be.


Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) – The Flocks of Sheep.png

The fun thing about the narrative is its conversational nature. You can feel Cervantes weaving it as he goes, making up the stories, embellishing the landscape and legend, growing his tale. It starts with remarks about the “short tale,” and then, when it becomes evident that the character has taken over the narrative and that we are flowing with his addictive madness, Cervantes opens up the scope. By the time we reach part two, it’s evident that the author is having fun with the meta nature of his craft, talking about a book published about Quixote and allowing our hero’s misadventures to arrive before him. His madness has become not only a local legend, but an articulated one recorded in the manner of ancient chivalries, the published volume preceding Quixote and enabling those he visits to further the comedy by setting elaborate schemes, hoping to some day be included in the knight’s escalating encounters with wizards and other vile plotters.

Cervantes uses this construct to make fun of his own writing – bringing up elements that were started and then forgotten, poking fun at his own inconsistencies, and otherwise building a tale that we can envision being told (or read) over a roaring fire with laughing friends. The narrative becomes its own character, and we’re taken with the smartness and sarcasm of the tongue-in-cheek craft. Nothing is sacred. Not knights-errant, not beautiful princesses, not even the form of recording chivalries itself.

But the comedy is not always just clever. Sometimes it is down-right Monty Pythonesque. We all know about the famous windmill scene, which is one of the first adventures. But there are many others – including a very memorable scatological one involving a terrified Sancho and a stuck Don Quixotie. We have Quixote’s mystical potion that is supposed to cure all wounds but instead induces projectile vomiting sprees. We have fights against sheep and wine skins. We have friends and priests who cage our hero and cross-dress to flummox him. We have rowdy villains who blanket toss the innocent Sancho. And, above all, we have continual battles that devolve into laugh-out-loud beatings as Quixote and Sancho are punished for their antisocial approaches, including one memorable scene where everyone beats everyone in a dark inn when a tryst does not go as planned. This may be an old book with old language, but the comedy is universal. You will laugh a lot. Sophomoric comedy was just as popular (and hilarious) in 1600s as it is today.

My favorite portion was the first part, before the author discovers the cleverness of meta-fiction and gets a little more grandiose, introducing a Duke and Duchess who use their wealth and station to set up more elaborate (although less amusing) pranks for Quixote to encounter. The first part of the book is more organic, more everyman, more slapstick and episodic. It’s simply delightful.

The second part of the book gives Quixote more knight-like adventures, yet it also takes the good-humored nature of his encounters and introduces a touch of cruelty with the Duke and Duchess. This is where we get our social commentary, where Quixote goes from a jester to an abused fool. It’s still amusing, but the story is darker now, and we stop to think about the viciousness of others and the nature of taking a jest too far.

The ending is serious, and although Quixote comes more into himself as the man he was before, the tragedy seems to say something different. Perhaps it was Quixote’s very madness that gave him a will to live, that introduced verve into his life. Without fiction, without imagination, without seeking adventures, what is left to live for? Can one become, perhaps, too practical? Even the Quixote detractors seem to realize their mistake, acknowledging that curing Quixote is ultimately what will kill him.

The book expertly delivers commentary and comedy, adventure and acerbic misadventures. It makes us think and above all it makes us laugh. Despite how old it is, the characters still have that “right here, right now” feel, a certain reality that makes it hard to part from them. In the end, even after 1,000+ pages, we’re still not quite ready to let go, and we wonder if perhaps this lunatic we’ve spent all this time laughing at is not perhaps wiser than we are. Perhaps he is the one who knows how to live and we are the tragedy?

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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