Don Quixote

⚖The case for it

He charges windmills he takes for giants, then "entered a flock of sheep he thought was an army," and four centuries later people still reach for those two scenes to explain the book. The engine underneath is the pairing: "Matching Don Quixote's supposed insanity is Sancho's so-called stupidity," one reader notes, neither man quite what the other assumes. The humor is physical and crude, slapstick one reader files as "violence that the Three Stooges would love," set hard against mock-noble chivalric diction. Then Part Two does what no 1615 novel should: characters who have read Part One turn up already famous, arguing with a rival's counterfeit sequel. Grossman's translation and its footnotes are what unlock the period jokes for a modern reader.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Part One cycles rather than builds, another delusion, another beating, another roadside inn. The knight blocks sympathy for plenty of readers, "insanely annoying, dangerous to himself and others, and just plain nuts," and the comedy keeps detouring into what one reader calls "nauseating forays into the land of dick and fart jokes." Then the seams show. Sancho's donkey vanishes and returns unexplained, and "this guy can't even keep the supporting character's wife's name straight," one reader complains, while even admiring critics concede "Cervantes is often falling asleep at the wheel." The Captive's Tale and its fellow embedded novellas stall the main road for chapters. Across nine hundred pages the fatigue arrives a quarter of the way into Part One, and it is a long way from there.

— the honest librarian

19h

honest hours

27

sittings