Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > Don Quixote

Cervantes, Don Quixote. "In a certain corner of la Mancha, the name of which I do not choose to remember, there lately lived one of those country gentleman, who adorn their halls with rusty lace and worm-eaten target, and ride forth on the skeleton of a horse, to course with a sort of a starved greyhound."

Don Quixote is one of my favorite comedies of all time. This opening phrase is steeped with irony and sarcasm. We are introduced to the loser town which the author is obviously embarrassed to have known and an out of date (rusty) and poor (worm-eaten) country gentleman (read "redneck") and given a less than a complimentary portrait of his magnificent steed, Rocinante (starved greyhound). Cervantes chooses to reveal himself from the get-go ("I") and stays with us during the entire two volumes of time-enduring text that is his literary legacy to us. This is also evident from the long and rambling sentence form. There is gallantry (ride forth) and pretention (adorn their halls) and yet a sort of hopelessness (skeleton of a horse) that infuses this sentence with a life of its own. And, the rest only gets better.

I think my favorite moment - and one of the more existential moments which make this truly a modern book - was when Don Quixote is suspended in air at Dolcinea's window, Riconante having wandered off eating grass. The entire work is full of comedy and humor. And don't miss the second part which he wrote because after publishing Part 1, life dealt him some harsh cards (soldiering wounds, prison, bankruptcy, exile...) during which a grifter wrote a sequel using his name and his characters. He was so insensed that he wrote a sequel and killed off Quixote so that there could be no more imitators. Incredible stuff.