Don Quixote

[Jasper Fidget]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Ghetta Life
> Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 2:29 PM
> To: vincent.bracq at wanadoo.fr; pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Don Quixote
> 
> After the Vineland read is over, I suggest we read this new translation of
> Don Quixote.  It is a quest novel with parallels to Gravity's Rainbow, is
> it
> not?  Doesn't Pynchon refer to this novel somewhere in GR?
> 
> >>http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1105510,00.html
> >>
> >>Don Quixote - the first modern novel - remains the finest. As a new
> >>translation of the Spanish classic is published, Harold Bloom argues
> that
> >>only Shakespeare comes close to Cervantes' genius
> 

>From Martin Amis's 1986 Atlantic Monthly article on _Don Quixote_ translated
by Tobias Smollett (reproduced in The War Against Cliché):

"While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one
fairly serious flaw–-that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should
know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm,
sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per
cent of the whole), inhumanly dull.

...

"Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most
impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable
reminiscences, and terrible cronies.  When the experience is over, and the
old boy checks out at last (on page 846--the prose wedged tight, with no
breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief or
regret but tears of pride.  You made it, despite all that _Don Quixote_
could do.

...

"[Cervantes'] epic is epic in length only; it has no pace, no drive.  An
anthology, an agglomeration, it simply accrues.  The question 'What happens
next?' has no meaning, because there is no next in _Don Quixote's_ world:
there is only more.  Through _Don Quixote_ we stare into the primal soup of
fiction, steaming, burping, fizzing with potential life, thick with crude
and pungent prototypes."