I finished it a couple of days ago and cried. I liked your thoughts but I did not pick up that sadism theme at all. Who was really taking advantage of who? It’s not that clear cut and I don’t believe things were ever taken too far. I was dreaming with Don Quixote for the entire book, and cried when the dream ended. ❤
his book reveals the virtues of the man, although he was crazy, he fought for his fame, pride and help to those in need and with each blow he got up and continued fighting for his ideal... a great message
I'm reading this book now, in the portuguese version because I'm Brazilian and i think how you. This book is perfect, funny, epic... the little's history how "the naughty curious" is awesome. The form how you expressed your facination is very good.
I started reading Don Quixote many years ago and loved it, but it was a bit too big of a project for my younger self. I still have the book though, and will definitely read the whole thing one day. The hilarity of it is not appreciated enough, and I suspect your very right about everything else as well ^^
I’ve read 2 different translations,but I can’t say one was better. Honestly, any translation is better than my English so I’m never fussy about translation
All this experimental and post modern stuff that many consider ground breaking but Cervantes did it all almost 500 years back. And that too sitting mostly in a prison cell with supposedly one arm, tells you that all creativity needs is the mind and no external stimulant.
Oh wow! Guess there's a good reason it's supposedly the second best selling book in history. Had a copy once but never got around to reading it but will definitely do now especially since my bookstore has a really nice Penguin clothbound edition out now.
Hey Kieran....will u be posting the review of victory city?(sir Rushdie's new novel)..will u read it?? Anyway this one was great and helpful....always wanted to read don Quixote but was intimidated by the length PS:u look more cute with the hair...
The next time someone dumps on Yankees, I'll console myself by remembering that at least we can reach the incredibly low bar of pronouncing Spanish correctly.
The following is only my reaction, my opinion, no hate mail, please. You love the book, think it the most hilarious, profound thing you’ve ever encountered? I’m happy for you. Enjoy. This is almost certainly the worst book I’ve ever forced myself to finish. It’s a very easy read. It is, however, humongous, hence time-consuming, at the end of which time you end up with nothing. NOTHING. Did I say “nothing”? I should have said - disbelief, exasperation, and rage. I find the assertions that Don Quixote is the first modern novel and, heaven help us, the greatest of all novels, patently ridiculous. For any number of reasons. Let’s begin with the fact that it’s been crafted, no less than most of the junk one finds when one walks into a commercial bookstore these days, to satisfy the demands of a bored middle class. Hence, we’ve got the lowest common denominator factor at work from the get-go. It’s a money-making venture, first and foremost. Intended, above all, to amuse. I would claim it fails spectacularly on that account, since there are no real protagonists, just wax figures upon whom Cervantes inflicts whatever random episodes occur to him. And when nothing occurs to him, well then, he just inserts unrelated stories, of which there are several in Part 1. He’s as bored as we are, apparently. It is said that this novel stands halfway between medieval storytelling, in which the interior world of the protagonist is of no interest, and the modern psychological novel. This seems to me absurd on the face of it, since neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza display even a hint of having an interior life. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in a couple of dozen pages, jumps off the page and into our hearts in a way one finds no hint of in DQ - she displays more life, self-awareness, and humor than our two protagonists manage to produce in 1000 pages of wearisome prose. BTW, re that “prose” - some folks imagine how wonderful the book must be in Spanish. But experts who know the language, including several great authors, have repeatedly said that there’s nothing remotely special about Cervantes’ use of language - the story’s the thing. Which story is that? Oh, you mean the 1000 pages of disconnected, psychologically unmotivated anecdotes with no over-arching narrative arc? Oh, I see. Gotcha. And then there is the issue of what drives the whole novel, what makes it “funny” or “entertaining”, which, for me, it is decidedly not. Two jokes - Quixote’s madness, never explained - not a shred of psychological insight is offered into what drives it other than he has read too many bad novels and chivalry, and Panza’s penchants for puns and the stuffing of his face, the former of which seems to have dramatically increased in Book 2, for no discernible reason. So - the reader is expected to sit back and continue to laugh over the course of 1000 pages over what? - what are ultimately, are two very feeble, unfunny “jokes”, ugh. It’s not a novel in any sense, by my lights. It has no narrative arc - it begins after the central event has already happened, Q’s descent into madness, without any psychological insight into its genesis. It goes nowhere, can go nowhere - it is a series of basically unrelated episodes, the order of which could easily be re-arranged without anything whatsoever being lost. That is to say, it has the form, more or less, of a TV sitcom. Nothing connects one episode to another other than the supposedly hysterical character flaws of the two main characters. It doesn’t rise to anywhere near the artistic level of the best TV sitcoms, e.g., the 1960’s Addams Family with John Astin and Carolyn Jones. It resembles it in that there is one disconnected episode one week, followed by another the following. It differs from it in this essential - Morticia and Gomez’s love is palpable, even moving. They are recognizable Homo sapiens, of flesh and blood, and we are touched by their love. There is nothing in this “novel” that is remotely moving. How could there be? Its principals are puppets, mannequins. Then it is claimed that the novel is “tragic”. That it is “cruel”, that the protagonists endure great cruelty. BWAHAHA. You hear this from blowhards like Harold Bloom, among other things. But the violence the two of them endure can just as easily be read as cartoonish, Laurel and Hardy type-violence. No one is seriously hurt, Quixote’s nose being a favorite target of this horrendous “cruelty and violence”. This is tragedy? Please. And then it is further claimed, by blowhards like Bloom,et al., that Cervantes is the equal of Shakespeare. This is when sanity has completely left the room - it is now time to clutch one’s forehead in disbelief. I believe one could make a very serious claim that the interior life in literature came into its own in the works of Shakespeare, whoever that was, whether it was that illiterate guy in Stratford, the Earl of Oxford, et al. - that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is - there’s not a hint of anyone’s interior life in this “novel”. Is Cervantes without talent? Of course not. Just to slop that much disparate material into one landfill, and to keep it going requires talent. Is it a work of “genius”, whatever that means? I don’t see any genius in it. Again, for me, there’s more genius in any half-dozen pages of the Canterbury Tales than there is in this gargantuan, flatulent collection of anecdotes that come from nowhere and go nowhere. I had heretofore successfully avoided reading this monstrous, empty nothing of a book, because I had intuited exactly what I ultimately experienced. I did read it, finally, because, it seemed to me something an educated person needs to have undergone, read, and experienced it - a lousy reason, if there ever was one. I wasn’t ennobled by it, entertained, transformed, and had not the slightest interest in the welfare of anyone in it, etc. Why? Because there was no one in it. Only a pastiche of mannequins, serving what purpose? None - other than to entertain a deeply bored middle-class who had learned to read and now had access to endless volumes of garbage. Sound familiar? Sound like the folks that walk into Barnes and Noble on a given afternoon? Why is it a “classic”? Because it was wildly popular in its time, because it arrived at the right time, because of its endless, utterly unnecessary length (let’s face it, it could easily be a 200 page book, and lose nothing), and then, most crucially, because of the host of “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomena which secured its place as “classic”, inc. all the bloated, tenured Professors and critics who dared not disagree with what had now become the orthodox, expected reverence towards this “Great Book”. And let’s not forget the phenomena of ancestor worship, Spanish pride, etc. One feels, learns, and is transformed by one great Shakespearean poem or soliloquy a thousand times more than what one comes away with at the end of a thousand pages of Don Quixote. What possessed Richard Strauss to take it seriously enough to create his tone poem is quite beyond me - my guess is that it was simply the opportunity to use his overblown orchestra to produce stunning effects portraying wind, sheep bleating, etc. BTW, the death of HIS Don Quixote leaves Cervantes’ in the dust. It is recognizably poignant and human. What a concept! I marvel that I made it to the end, and I am extremely happy to now put it aside and never give it a second thought. I purchased it, and am sorely tempted to throw it in the garbage. It won’t stay with me, haunt me, none of that, not a chance. One can only be haunted by the ghosts of the once living. Nothing lives in this book. The protagonist who dies at the end of Don Quixote was never alive in the first place. In fact, his “return to sanity” and subsequent death makes even less sense than his initial descent into madness with which the book begins. Chalk it up to “melancholy”, says Cervantes, in the space of THREE OR FOUR PAGES. Anyone remotely familiar with the phenomenon of melancholy knows full well that, if it induces cognitive reshaping of any kind, it is in a direction other than towards the embracing of reality. But let’s be honest - the whole purpose of Quixote’s “return to sanity” is a lazy excuse to prohibit the author of the “false Don Quixote” from taking up his pen again and making money which Cervantes wants for himself. In fact, this is how the “novel” ends, making its purpose plain as day, with a trashing of the false author - Cervantes shows his cards, plain as day. If you were baffled, frustrated, and impatient with the absurd premise of this thousand page collection of spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically empty anecdotes, and hoping for some sort of payoff at its close, however small, you will be absolutely INFURIATED when you reach its last pages, and are likely to close the book in absolute disbelief. I want the twenty odd hours I spent enduring this empty nonsense back. It’s a minority view, I know. But it is mine.
GALLOP ON, ROCINANTE❗ JUSTICE SHALL PREVAIL‼🔥🗣
It is mind blowing to think of when it was written and who Cervantes' contemporaries were.
Really good review, makes Don Quixote into a book that I wanted to read but was slightly intimidated by to a must-read.
The immature humour is something unsaid, but it’s really immature at times 😂 it’s aware of how ridiculous it is as well
@@KDbooks I love a good fart joke tbf so I’m down!
Hope you read it, I'm reading it now and it's so good
I finished it a couple of days ago and cried. I liked your thoughts but I did not pick up that sadism theme at all. Who was really taking advantage of who? It’s not that clear cut and I don’t believe things were ever taken too far. I was dreaming with Don Quixote for the entire book, and cried when the dream ended. ❤
his book reveals the virtues of the man, although he was crazy, he fought for his fame, pride and help to those in need and with each blow he got up and continued fighting for his ideal... a great message
@@meconio_ibiza2621 the whole book is a critique of idealism xd
Totally agree, this is the greatest novel ever written. Just pure genius
Thanks for the great review! I just read Don Quixote a few weeks ago and I absolutely loved it! It's now one of my all time favorites!
So glad to see you do a DQ review one of my all time favourite books. It really was so many years ahead of it's time. Absolutely phenomenal book :)
Oooomph this one is on my list! Also your initial thought of how Quixote is pronounced made me fall out 😂😂😂
😂
I wasn’t sure whether to read this one but I think you’ve convinced me.
I am about to read DQ for the first time. I am relieved that this review is positive. I'm excited
I'm reading this book now, in the portuguese version because I'm Brazilian and i think how you. This book is perfect, funny, epic... the little's history how "the naughty curious" is awesome. The form how you expressed your facination is very good.
I started reading Don Quixote many years ago and loved it, but it was a bit too big of a project for my younger self. I still have the book though, and will definitely read the whole thing one day. The hilarity of it is not appreciated enough, and I suspect your very right about everything else as well ^^
Adding to my list. I love hearing the history behind it.
Is there a translation that's better than others?
I’ve read 2 different translations,but I can’t say one was better. Honestly, any translation is better than my English so I’m never fussy about translation
I have the Grossman and Rutherford translations - and prefer the former :)
Really nice discussion.
Thank you Paromita 😊
All this experimental and post modern stuff that many consider ground breaking but Cervantes did it all almost 500 years back. And that too sitting mostly in a prison cell with supposedly one arm, tells you that all creativity needs is the mind and no external stimulant.
And a ton of free time, xD
Oh wow! Guess there's a good reason it's supposedly the second best selling book in history. Had a copy once but never got around to reading it but will definitely do now especially since my bookstore has a really nice Penguin clothbound edition out now.
I just finished this and really enjoyed it. Way funnier than I thought it would be!
I can tell you really liked this one because you didn't hurl it over your shoulder. 😂 I really need to read Don Quixote.
why is it always evening
don quijote is probably the book that intimidates me the most i feel like if i read it and not like it i will never be able to exit my house again
I wasn't prepared for how funny the first book was
Brilliant!!😊
Yas! It's so good.
Hey Kieran....will u be posting the review of victory city?(sir Rushdie's new novel)..will u read it??
Anyway this one was great and helpful....always wanted to read don Quixote but was intimidated by the length
PS:u look more cute with the hair...
I have under 100 pages of VC to read 😊 hoping review goes out by Wednesday
finished it today :D
How’d you find it
Reading Don Quixote in Spanish is a precious thing, translations do not do justice to its majesty
I’m evidently not Spanish… and don’t speak Spanish… I’ll take the translation
So many great scenes! When he frees the prisoners…😅😅
3:18 ok but are there bananas 🍌
Don Q. Was way funnier than I expected when I first read it
Benjamin McEvoy approves this message
The next time someone dumps on Yankees, I'll console myself by remembering that at least we can reach the incredibly low bar of pronouncing Spanish correctly.
And how’s your Welsh?
charlatans discuss windmills, philosophers discuss cueva de montesinos
*The impossible dream*
The following is only my reaction, my opinion, no hate mail, please. You love the book, think it the most hilarious, profound thing you’ve ever encountered? I’m happy for you. Enjoy.
This is almost certainly the worst book I’ve ever forced myself to finish. It’s a very easy read. It is, however, humongous, hence time-consuming, at the end of which time you end up with nothing. NOTHING. Did I say “nothing”? I should have said - disbelief, exasperation, and rage.
I find the assertions that Don Quixote is the first modern novel and, heaven help us, the greatest of all novels, patently ridiculous. For any number of reasons.
Let’s begin with the fact that it’s been crafted, no less than most of the junk one finds when one walks into a commercial bookstore these days, to satisfy the demands of a bored middle class. Hence, we’ve got the lowest common denominator factor at work from the get-go. It’s a money-making venture, first and foremost. Intended, above all, to amuse. I would claim it fails spectacularly on that account, since there are no real protagonists, just wax figures upon whom Cervantes inflicts whatever random episodes occur to him. And when nothing occurs to him, well then, he just inserts unrelated stories, of which there are several in Part 1. He’s as bored as we are, apparently.
It is said that this novel stands halfway between medieval storytelling, in which the interior world of the protagonist is of no interest, and the modern psychological novel. This seems to me absurd on the face of it, since neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza display even a hint of having an interior life. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in a couple of dozen pages, jumps off the page and into our hearts in a way one finds no hint of in DQ - she displays more life, self-awareness, and humor than our two protagonists manage to produce in 1000 pages of wearisome prose. BTW, re that “prose” - some folks imagine how wonderful the book must be in Spanish. But experts who know the language, including several great authors, have repeatedly said that there’s nothing remotely special about Cervantes’ use of language - the story’s the thing. Which story is that? Oh, you mean the 1000 pages of disconnected, psychologically unmotivated anecdotes with no over-arching narrative arc? Oh, I see. Gotcha.
And then there is the issue of what drives the whole novel, what makes it “funny” or “entertaining”, which, for me, it is decidedly not. Two jokes - Quixote’s madness, never explained - not a shred of psychological insight is offered into what drives it other than he has read too many bad novels and chivalry, and Panza’s penchants for puns and the stuffing of his face, the former of which seems to have dramatically increased in Book 2, for no discernible reason. So - the reader is expected to sit back and continue to laugh over the course of 1000 pages over what? - what are ultimately, are two very feeble, unfunny “jokes”, ugh.
It’s not a novel in any sense, by my lights. It has no narrative arc - it begins after the central event has already happened, Q’s descent into madness, without any psychological insight into its genesis. It goes nowhere, can go nowhere - it is a series of basically unrelated episodes, the order of which could easily be re-arranged without anything whatsoever being lost. That is to say, it has the form, more or less, of a TV sitcom. Nothing connects one episode to another other than the supposedly hysterical character flaws of the two main characters. It doesn’t rise to anywhere near the artistic level of the best TV sitcoms, e.g., the 1960’s Addams Family with John Astin and Carolyn Jones. It resembles it in that there is one disconnected episode one week, followed by another the following. It differs from it in this essential - Morticia and Gomez’s love is palpable, even moving. They are recognizable Homo sapiens, of flesh and blood, and we are touched by their love. There is nothing in this “novel” that is remotely moving. How could there be? Its principals are puppets, mannequins.
Then it is claimed that the novel is “tragic”. That it is “cruel”, that the protagonists endure great cruelty. BWAHAHA. You hear this from blowhards like Harold Bloom, among other things. But the violence the two of them endure can just as easily be read as cartoonish, Laurel and Hardy type-violence. No one is seriously hurt, Quixote’s nose being a favorite target of this horrendous “cruelty and violence”. This is tragedy? Please.
And then it is further claimed, by blowhards like Bloom,et al., that Cervantes is the equal of Shakespeare. This is when sanity has completely left the room - it is now time to clutch one’s forehead in disbelief. I believe one could make a very serious claim that the interior life in literature came into its own in the works of Shakespeare, whoever that was, whether it was that illiterate guy in Stratford, the Earl of Oxford, et al. - that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is - there’s not a hint of anyone’s interior life in this “novel”.
Is Cervantes without talent? Of course not. Just to slop that much disparate material into one landfill, and to keep it going requires talent. Is it a work of “genius”, whatever that means? I don’t see any genius in it. Again, for me, there’s more genius in any half-dozen pages of the Canterbury Tales than there is in this gargantuan, flatulent collection of anecdotes that come from nowhere and go nowhere.
I had heretofore successfully avoided reading this monstrous, empty nothing of a book, because I had intuited exactly what I ultimately experienced. I did read it, finally, because, it seemed to me something an educated person needs to have undergone, read, and experienced it - a lousy reason, if there ever was one. I wasn’t ennobled by it, entertained, transformed, and had not the slightest interest in the welfare of anyone in it, etc. Why? Because there was no one in it. Only a pastiche of mannequins, serving what purpose? None - other than to entertain a deeply bored middle-class who had learned to read and now had access to endless volumes of garbage. Sound familiar? Sound like the folks that walk into Barnes and Noble on a given afternoon?
Why is it a “classic”? Because it was wildly popular in its time, because it arrived at the right time, because of its endless, utterly unnecessary length (let’s face it, it could easily be a 200 page book, and lose nothing), and then, most crucially, because of the host of “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomena which secured its place as “classic”, inc. all the bloated, tenured Professors and critics who dared not disagree with what had now become the orthodox, expected reverence towards this “Great Book”. And let’s not forget the phenomena of ancestor worship, Spanish pride, etc.
One feels, learns, and is transformed by one great Shakespearean poem or soliloquy a thousand times more than what one comes away with at the end of a thousand pages of Don Quixote. What possessed Richard Strauss to take it seriously enough to create his tone poem is quite beyond me - my guess is that it was simply the opportunity to use his overblown orchestra to produce stunning effects portraying wind, sheep bleating, etc. BTW, the death of HIS Don Quixote leaves Cervantes’ in the dust. It is recognizably poignant and human. What a concept!
I marvel that I made it to the end, and I am extremely happy to now put it aside and never give it a second thought. I purchased it, and am sorely tempted to throw it in the garbage. It won’t stay with me, haunt me, none of that, not a chance. One can only be haunted by the ghosts of the once living. Nothing lives in this book. The protagonist who dies at the end of Don Quixote was never alive in the first place. In fact, his “return to sanity” and subsequent death makes even less sense than his initial descent into madness with which the book begins. Chalk it up to “melancholy”, says Cervantes, in the space of THREE OR FOUR PAGES. Anyone remotely familiar with the phenomenon of melancholy knows full well that, if it induces cognitive reshaping of any kind, it is in a direction other than towards the embracing of reality. But let’s be honest - the whole purpose of Quixote’s “return to sanity” is a lazy excuse to prohibit the author of the “false Don Quixote” from taking up his pen again and making money which Cervantes wants for himself. In fact, this is how the “novel” ends, making its purpose plain as day, with a trashing of the false author - Cervantes shows his cards, plain as day. If you were baffled, frustrated, and impatient with the absurd premise of this thousand page collection of spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically empty anecdotes, and hoping for some sort of payoff at its close, however small, you will be absolutely INFURIATED when you reach its last pages, and are likely to close the book in absolute disbelief.
I want the twenty odd hours I spent enduring this empty nonsense back. It’s a minority view, I know. But it is mine.
How many LitBro dog whistles can you put in a review? 😂