Battered

"There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza."
- Harold Bloom How to Read and Why

It is no secret that Harold Bloom loves Don Quixote. He calls it "the first and best of all novels", and has managed to trace back almost every written work back to either Cervantes or Shakespeare. So I approached the book rather excited. "This will completley change my perception on life?" I thought, "I'm in."

It took awhile, a long while, a few months to be exact, to finish the book. Stretched out over these 940 pages is five different jobs, two months, a breakup, and lots of scotch tape that is now serving as the binding for the cover and back.

So I had a lot of time with Quixote and Panza, and I quite like them. Especially Sancho Panza, who Cervantes even admired, because when he opens his mouth inevitably something funny happens as a result. There aren't many four hundred year old novels that are this humorous.

But why is it that as a novel seems to have as many faults as it does strengths? Numerous mistakes and typos are made, including a rather important one on whether Sancho Panza loses a donkey or not. Panza's wife has at least four different names. And the novellas! Three are placed haphazardly through the first book and so obviously bad, one wonders whether Cervantes went out of his way to make them so. Nearly everything that makes the novel so enjoyable is let go, meaning they ill-paced, wordy and misogynistic. They are drowned in male fantasies of women saving themselves and even killing themselves for pure love. We live in a post-modern world, I read M Butterfly, I don't care.

The book could have been safely trimmed to 700 pages without missing a single word about Quixote or Panza, because of these ridiculous novellas that don't have anything to do with the story. My advice to anyone reading this is to skip any pages where the two main characters aren't present. You aren't missing a thing.

As well, I don't feel changed as I thought I would be. Nothing is quite like reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Sun Also Rises, or even On the Road for the first time. Last night I had a religious epiphany when I read a short story by Flannery O'Conner. This novel exists as something else. It really is only about character. The plot is of little importance, because the only thing that matters is Quixote and Panza talking to each other. Luckily the second book eschews the novellas and focuses on this pair.

It's a fascinating book, one that I'd recommned to people with a lot of time, but I still can't shake the feeling of unease that I have about it. Maybe my personal life got wrapped up in the adventures, maybe all the evil in the world that Quixote was fighting didn't mean anything to my own troubles, but this book never had the importance that I would have liked it to have. There are no cliff-hangers, nothing to push the reader forward. Just two wonderful souls who can talk for hours.

Maybe that's all I should have hoped for. In a rushed world, where every story has plots that only race frantically to the end trying to prove something the entire time, wandering around with two vagabounds through the Spanish country side seems a little tedious. But I got to know them more completely than I could have any other way, and in that way are as real to me as some friends. Maybe I just need some distance from them, we have been spending too much time together I think. Like interesting friends you've meet through social groups you no longer care to keep in contact with, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza will always be tied to stressful times. That doesn't lessen their impact but does shape my view of them.