It’s official: I give up. I’ve waded through the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, but after a few chapters of the second part I gave up. I just can’t do this any more. It’s too tedious. You have that hidalgo Don Quixote, who has gone so raving mad from reading too many romances of chivalry, that he is convinced that he is a member of the lost and honorable order of knights-errant. So he goes out righting wrongs, setting free captured innocents, rescuing fair maidens and slaying giants. (This last episode, the famous one with the windmills, comes early on and lasts all of a page and a half.) Except that there is an awful lot of talking, and repetition, and asides, and references to other romances of chivalry, and blah blah blah.
I’m very sure that it is a very important book and all that, but it’s apparently not for me. (Given that the second part was published ten years or so after the first one, I think I deserve a pass.)
- Book read
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra — The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha (Fourth-Centenary Translation. Translated and with notes by Tom Lathorp)
- First line
- In a village in La Mancha, which I won’t name, there lived not long ago an hidalgo of the kind that have a lance in the lance rack, an old shield, a lean nag, and a fleet greyhound.