Don Quixote

For the majority of my life, I've been obsessed with the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha. At age five my father took me to see Raul Julia and Sheena Easton in a national tour of the musical Man of La Mancha that came through San Francisco. As it was the first piece of professional adult-oriented theatre I'd seen (not counting a production of Peter Pan and several Nutcracker ballets, as those are designed to be viewed by children), I naturally loved it. The structure of Miguel de Cervantes acting out the story he was writing with the help of his fellow prisoners was, in retrospect, a brilliant framing device that allowed the story to focus in on Quixote's core adventures, which are really the only parts I'd wager most people remember from the nearly 1,000 page novel.

That same year, which was somewhere between 1989 or 1990, I remember that there was a cartoon that reinvented the Don Quixote story through "The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda."(I know. It's so adorably clever.) I'm pretty sure I watched that show religiously, especially after seeing Man of La Mancha and becoming unnaturally obsessed will all things Don Quixote. Coyote's adventures were very loosely based on his loosely homophonic namesakes--fights with windmills pretending to be giants were in the intro segment of every show--but mostly the cartoon seemed to be an exploration of a joke someone at Hannah-Barbera came up with during a brainstorming session. Not suprisingly, the show was only on for a season. I guess that's what you get for creating a cartoon with little content and a literary inside joke for a title, barring the obivious impossibility that a coyote and a panda would be friends and ride skinny horses and donkeys. I'm pretty sure that Don Coyote would have eaten Sancho Panda the first chance he got.

I'll interject here that throughout my childhood, my father -- a great lover of musical theatre, being kind of a ham, and singing at completely inappropriate times -- loved to encourage my creativity by quoting the stand-out song from the Quixote musical, reminding me to dream "The Impossible Dream." My strange affinity for all things Don Quixote may have something to with that constant refrain.

If we flash forward to me being somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12, Don Quixote becomes part of my life once again. There's a PBS live-action show called "Wishbone," which is about a precocious Jack Russel terrier that loves to read. (The goal of the show being that if children watch how much an adorable dog likes to read and applies lessons from Great Works of Literature to his own life, the children watching Wishbone may adhere to that lesson, as well.) In one episode, "The Impawsable Dream," Wishbone reads Don Quixote and applies Quixote's struggles to do impossible things to his owner's desire to win a free-throw contest, despite not having particularly great basketball skills. (You know, because he's 12 and white and from the suburbs.) Wishbone gets to play Sancho Panza in his version of the tale, and the episode keeps most of the same adventures as other alternate-media-abridged-Don Quixotes do: windmill fighting, much discussion of sanity of lack thereof by concerned friends and relatives, stays at inns, feats of glory, etc.

With all that Don Quixote in my formative years, it's quite a feat in itself that I'd managed to not read it until very recently. I'm even more amazed at the sudden resurgance of this lengthy 15th century Manchegan chivalric ode in early 1990s popular culture. I couldn't have even imagined that this book would remain such a large part of American cultural capital outside of highly literate circles.

I'm writing this nearly two months after finishing the epic tome -- the 922-page Edith Grossman translation, no less -- so I'm afraid that my memory of all the novel's events might not be as accurate as if I'd read it freshly. But my purpose in this is not to review a centuries old novel, but rather to muse on its involvement in my own life and explore why it's still relevant.

I will say this, though: reading Don Quixote is an experience. It is time-consuming, but also completely awe-inspiring. First of all, there's far more that happens to Don Quixote and Sancho in the novel than any of the cutesy pop-culture versions could have ever hoped to include -- nor should they have tried. The musical Man of La Mancha gets the crux of the first half of the book and does well to chose to focus on only a few of the novel's key themes. Furthermore, the musical strives to integrate Cervantes' life with that of Alonso Quijana/Don Quixote, and its incredibly effective and poignant. I like things that show us how an author's life influences their work (re: why Quills is my favorite movie). And "The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda" and "Wishbone" basically boil the story down to the parts that are interesting to children: the adventures. "Wishbone" tries to make the book more thematic and relateable through its kid-friendly side stories, but ultimately reduces a complex work into something far to simple to really hold any meaning. Although, I will say that "Wishbone" did an incredible job capturing some of the small details of the novel. When I was still in the process of reading the book, my husband found the "Wishbone" episode -- with absolutely no mention from me about the series -- and Tivoed it for me. In watching it concurrently with reading the book, I noticed that the producers of "Wishbone" chose to highlight one key feature of Sancho Panza's personality above all others: dude likes food. Sancho loves to eat and constantly begs Don Quixote for food throughout the novel, Quixote often removing the food from Sancho because it is either invalorous for a knight errant to eat or somehow an affront to chivalry/human decency to do so. With Wishbone as Sancho, all the dog is concerned with, other than pointing out that windmills are not, in fact, giants, is getting a snack. Hilarious.

That's another thing about Don Quixote: the book is filled with so much more humor and charm than any of its pop culture incarnations could ever hope to capture. Not that I've read any other translations to compare, but I believe the Edith Grossman translation handles the particular flavor of Cervantes' Spanish effectively, picking up on Sancho's numerous solecisims and mis-quoted proverbs and rendering complex writing into a beautiful and effortlessly readable prose. I'm fond of Grossman's translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so I intentionally waited to get my hands on Quixote translation before reading any ol' Quixote.

What strikes me most about Don Quixote is that it's really a love letter to readership. It's a lengthy novel that makes fun of an outdated genre, filled with tropes from pastoral novels, pastoral poetry, chivalric romances, epics and other popular literature of Cervantes' contemporaries. There are moments in the book where the main characters are aware of the joke, and moments where Quixote waxes poetic about his favorite books. Essentially, those in the book that believe Quijana has gone mad blame it on his love of literature. Indeed, it is Alonso Quijana's love of reading that transforms him from an ordinary old man to a vigilant knight errant. Being a reader, experiencing readership, changes our individual worlds, or at least our views of them. There's a scene that I particularly love where the inquisitors come to Quijana's home and decide to burn his library, but just can't seem to get rid of everything. Even these men who believe that reading has poisoned Quijana's mind and made him mad with imagination can't seem to part with the idea of literature as a whole.

So maybe it's that message that I take to heart most from Don Quixote, not my father's half-sung refrains of dreaming an impossible dream, but the idea that readership changes us, and can both enrich and destroy us, as certainly it does for Alonso Quijana. For those of us who become involved in our reading, I think that idea rings true. And that no matter how potentially dangerous the ideas we encounter while reading might be, we still welcome them and participate in that discourse.

Perhaps, ultimately, even in its most pared-down incarnations, maybe that's what attracts us to the story of a half-mad knight errant and his cheeky, ill-chosen squire: the timelessness of the themes of readership. Though that message isn't as powerful when not in written form, I think it may be one reason why Don Quixote stands out over other novels of its type. There's just something so sweet and endearing about a man who has been stirred to action by the power of the written word that, even when you're watching that story acted out by Raul Julia, or a Jack Russel terrier, or a cartoon coyote, all you really want to do is curl up with a good book and experience that kind of passion for yourself.



Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Translated by Edith Grossman
Harper Perennial, 2005
922 pages

Breath, Eyes, Memory

I have not been so hurt by a book in such a long time.

And I mean that.

But there really is a part of me that must thrive on this kind of emotional masochism because even though Edwidge Danticat's content made me hurt so much to read this book, I could not stop. There is something about her prose that presents her reader with such terrible things as rape, abandoment, and self-mutilation in such a beautiful and poignant way that one much continue to read onward, and, like her narrator and the other Caco women of the novel, try to grow past these things and heal.

Not all of them can, but then again, neither can all of the other women in the world who have been hurt by violence, and perhaps that's why Breath, Eyes, Memory manages to transcend it's very specific audience of Afro-Carribean women (specifically, Haitian) and speaks universally to all women. (If it didn't, Oprah would never have rewarded it with her book club seal of approval.)

Even before I had finished Breath, Eyes, Memory, I knew that I would add it to my roster of favorite books. And as I grow older, I am less and less suprised that those books I usually treasure so dearly are books that confront the relationships between mothers and daughters. (My favorite book of all time, for instance, is Toni Morrison's Beloved.) Maybe these books speak to me simply because I am a woman, a daughter who one days hopes so dearly to become a mother. Maybe these books speak to me because they make me confront my relationship with my own mother. Maybe there is no connection at all between the stories I like and it is simply the weight of the prose that makes these particular books so special. Or perhaps it is all of these things.

All I know for certain is that halfway through the book, I called my mother to recommend it to her. She is not the kind of woman who typically shops for reads in the "Fiction/Literature" section of the bookstore. Generally, she peruses the mystery/suspense section and has recently, much to my dismay, developed a taste for Dan Brown novels. But despite her literary taste, I want her to read this book. I feel as though Danticat's book has forced me to do what it's women must do. I must confront the things and people who have hurt me, because if I do not, then the cycles of pain will only continue on to my eventual daughters. If my grandmother had the education to read for pleasure (she dropped out in 6th grade), I would have her read this too. Somehow, I think this will help us all.

No one needs the trite and artless, so-called "inspirational" stories that can be found in the endless volumes of Chicken Soup for the (Insert Profession, Gender or Hobby Here)'s Soul when they have prose as powerful and artful as Danticat's. Real inspiration is right there.

Breath, Eyes, Memory
Edwidge Danticat
Vintage Contemporaries, 1998 (2nd edition)

Jane Eyre

The first time I read Jane Eyre, I stopped reading the book at the end of volume 2. This is something of an embarrassing admission, because I really do like reading things and I'm quite a fan of the Victorian and Romantic periods, like Gothic novels and feminists and whatnot. There really wasn't any reason for me to stop reading Jane Eyre: it's really quite tailored to suit me. But the first time I read it, I was fifteen and still in my goth-punk phase and I really identified more with the madwoman in the attic than anyone else and I hadn't yet turned into a Victorianist (despite my enthusiasm for Tim Burton). Even so, I still got an A on the final and the final paper, both of which pertained solely to Jane Eyre--and I didn't even use Cliff's Notes.

With that confession aside, I can admit that now, 5 years later, I've gotten quite a lot out of Jane Eyre. Especially now that I've read the ending. There are a lot of people out there who look at Jane Eyre as a feminist text. This is certainly why I was forced to read it at my all-girls Catholic high school. But simply calling it a feminist text without underlying support is problematic. I don't think Jane Eyre quite qualifies for that genre-marker.

While it is true that in 1847, Charlotte Bronte was doing what so many women were unable to do: write and be published. And that's quite watershed in and of itself. The text advocates a radical social change: marriage for love, not for convenience, class or coin. This kind of advocacy is about as feminist as you can be for the mid-19th century (short of women's suffrage and questions of women's roles in society). I think we ought to respect the novel for what it did at it's time and for the lasting impression it has made on the literary scene, but those two reasons are not quite enough to call it a feminist novel.

If it were truly a feminist work, it would not also function as a teaching tool for proper Victorian femininity. Both Jane and Bertha Rochester are called "passionate" and their problem is really that they are too "passionate." Passionate here can be angry, sexual, or any other synonym of the sort. Because they are passionate, they are both imprisoned. Bertha is clearly much more extreme in her passion, and is locked up never to be let out again. Jane learns from her experience in the red room to control her passions and use them appropriately. At Lowood school, Helen Burns is far too submissive and docile (almost to the point of masochism), so she naturally succumbs to death. In other words, a good Victorian woman shouldn't be too submissive, but not to passionate either. The result is the adult Jane Eyre: a smart, independent woman who knows when to hold her tongue and when to speak out.

The idea of the novel as a teaching tool of how women ought to be makes it problematic to be considered a feminist work. A feminist work wouldn't condemn Bertha Rochester for being too passionate/sexual (although I do realize this sort of thing is supposed to be condemned in the Victorian era), nor would it condemn Celine Varens, or the Reed sisters the way it does. A feminist work would never condemn another woman--not even the overly submissive Helen Burns.

However, I think Jane Eyre herself is an excellent feminist icon. Even when Rochester confides in her about his forced marriage to Bertha, she leaves him and tells him that while it would not be wicked for her to love him, "it would be to obey." When she decides to come back to him, even after he is crippled and blind, she does so because she loves him, but also because she is clearly more powerful. They are equals in every way but their physically strengths and deficiencies by the end of the novel, and at this point Jane is clearly physically stronger than her handless, blind husband. Were it not for Jane Eyre herself, I doubt the work would even be considered a feminist hallmark.

Harry Potter Revisited

While Goblet of Fire is still my favorite book and Prisoner of Azkaban remains my favorite movie, I've got to say that Half-Blood Prince is certainly up there on my list.

If you haven't read it, you really ought not to check out the new t-shirts at tshirthell.com for awhile. I completely ruined the book for my fiance because I saw their new Harry Potter shirt and, naturally, read it to my roommate while I was on the phone with my fiance. Just a heads up.

There's really not a whole lot I can saw about Harry Potter. They are what they are. They may not be the most literary of things, but I appreciate Rowling's mythological breadth and her overly-obvious names for certain characters. (Really? A man named Sirius can turn into a dog? And a man named Lupin is a werewolf? Who would have thought?) Now that I've finished book 6, I am filled with a strange anxiety about what exactly I will do with myself when the series is over. I know that they're children's books, but I maintain that currently literature marketed at young adults (specifically, young adult girls) is some of the best stuff out there. That's why I still creep over to the young adult fiction section every now and again and peruse the shelves, hoping for a new Francesca Lia Block novel or, at the very least, to take great pride in the issues bring addressed by the other novels lining the shelves. Purchasing Potter novels just seemed to give me a much more legitimate reason to be in Barnes and Noble Jr.

I guess I'll just have to hope that by the time the series ends (which should be in about 2-4 years, depending on whether or not Rowling expands to 8 books), that I'll have kids of my own and an even more legitimate reason to be fussing about in the kids bookstore.

When you spend as much as I do, the bookstore gives you free pens.

But only two free pens.

My massive purchase roster for my summer classes is as follows:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• The God of Small Things by Arundati Roy
• Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
• Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• The Lover by Marguerite Duras
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
• Pamela by Samuel Richardson
• Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
• Restoration and 18th Century Comedy, ed. Scott McMillin

And one other exceptionally lengthy anthology of 18th century literature.

Naturally, four of these books have been stricken from the syllabus, but I refuse to return them. How can I very well return a book in my possession when I may, some day, want to read it? Honestly, I doubt I'd read Fielding on my own, but you never know when you want to read a restoration comedy!

This, this is why I have no money.

Will in the World

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is a truly insightful, delightful read. One critic called it "a love letter to a man we so desperately wish we could have known," and it's very, very true. It's good if you know Shakespeare's works, but I imagine that its not so good for those who have no familiarity outside of Romeo and Juliet. Greenblatt rather lovingly imagines the wzay Shakespeare's life very probibly influenced his art, from his personal relationships with his parents, wife and children, to Elizabethan society's persecution of so-called "others," fascination with royalty, and theatrical trends of the time.

I'm particularly fond of Greenblatt's observations on Shakespeare's sonnets in the chapter titled "Master-Mistress." In addition to exploring the relationship between the first part of the sonnet sequence (which are clearly written to a young man, even Sonnet 20 from which the title of Greenblatt's chapter is drawn) and the second half (attriuted to a "Dark Lady"), Greenblatt argues that homosexual love would not have been considered outrightly wrong in the Elizabethan period, as women were viewd practically as non-persons and, in some ways, utterly loathed. Therefore, it seemed perfectly logical for men to develop attractions to other men. Sodomy, however, was still strictly prohibited. Having homosexual loves was okay, but acting upon them was most certainly not.

English majors: this book will help you with every Shakespeare class you will ever take. It's well worth the $26.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I know this came out on Friday and all, and I'm not the kind of person who goes out to buy things so immediately, but I was home this past weekend hanging out with my parents' exchange students and we had all been talking about Harry Potter books/movies.

So my mom went to Costco and bought 5 copies of Half-Blood Prince so we could each have one. Sara and Mirjam didn't know what to do. "Dianna, how much do you want us to give for this?"

My parents were always the kind of people to drop huge amounts of cash to buy me books, so I guess they're also the kind of people who drop huge amounts of cash so that their exchange students can have Harry Potter before other kids in their country do.

I'm still reading Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, so I've yet to start reading it. But I'll get to it. I know people are beating me to it. I saw 4 copies of Half-Blood Prince make their way into the Oakland Coliseum at Sunday's game . . . which was probably the best idea ever considering that game when into 14 innings!

June Book Drop

Books Read:
The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes--Neil Gaiman
Y: The Last Man--Unmanned
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay--Michael Chabon

Books Bought:
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist Vol. 1--Michael Chabon et al.

This month's theme is comic books. As finals approached rapidly and I spent all my time desperately trying to finish heavy peices of modernist prose at May's end, I decided to start reading graphic novels. And, in reading the aforementioned graphic novels that I had borrowed from my friends in the winter, I decided that the one novel I should pull off my jam-packed bookshelf would be Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

I don't actually know why it took me so damn long to sit down with Sandman. I borrowed it from Corey on my birthday in January, and it sat on my desk unread until June. As to The Last Man, Cassie's boyfriend brought it over when they started dating in April and it sat on our table until every last one of us had read it.

Here's why I adore the graphic novel: the graphic novel is the link between books and movies. Graphic novels employ cinematic cuts and "camera angles" to emphasize the active and emotive qualities of the story, as films do, but relies on a literary format to do so. They're thicker, generally, and more complex than comic books, often dealing with incredible mythologies (like Sandman) and more adult subjects (like The Last Man) than their comic cousins. Comics and graphic novels, alike, though allow their readers easy access to complex themes and provide an introduction to basic literary conventions. They're also much easier to digest on the whole.

Sandman Chronicles I think most readers have heard of. And I can now personally vouch for the merits of Gaiman's characters and his stories. The art in it is beautiful: a nice blend of gothic style with classic comic drawing. It's a great graphic novel for those who like the resonance of Frank Miller's naratives (specifically through repetition of phrase), but with a touch of Baudilere under them. I liked them, but I liked The Last Man much, much more.

Let me begin on The Last Man by introducing some topics that recurr throughout the first issue: feminism, gendercide, gender issues as a whole, american politics, Jewish mysticism, and sources of power. Also, there is a monkey. The Last Man is the story of Yorick, the only man to survive a strange and sudden plague that eliminates anything with a Y-chromosome . . . except for Yorick and his male monkey. This turns the world into chaos. Supermodels have no purpose in a society with no male gaze. (They can now only make money by collecting the dead bodies of single men who rotted away in their apartments.) The Secretary of Agriculture is now President. And a brigade of feminist "Amazons" who believe that the man-killing plague is a sign of male inferiority and the female right to rule are taking over the land. When I finished the first issue of The Last Man, I immediately wanted to find the successive issues. It is an incredible character driven, theme-laden narrative that addresses so many crucial social concerns. I was thoroughly impressed. (Also, the cuts leading up to the man-plague are so intense I can barely begin to describe them.)

It's nice to think about the fact that The Last Man's Yorick is introduced to us as an escape artist, because that is also how we are introduced to Josef Kavalier in Chabon's Kavalier & Clay. Escape worked so well as a central motif on which Chabon chose to hang his story. If there's one thing I can say for Chabon it is that he writes a very tight story. Nothing is extraneous. "Escape" certainly isn't thrown about lightly. It is the one word that both Kavalier & Clay understand. For Josef Kavalier, like thousands of other European Jews before WWII, escape was the only means of survival. Josef manages to escape because he is a trained escape artist, schooled after America's most famous immigrant, Harry Houdini. It is Joe's escape from Prague and Nazi rule that inspires the comic book character The Escapist, which ties nicely into his American cousin Sammy Klaymann's world of escape: comic books. Sammy's dreams of escaping his current lifestyle and polio-ridden legs are invested in the masked heroes that he and his cousin create. The Escapist encompasses both men at once. This is exactly what I mean when I say that Chabon writes a tight story. It goes on to be more complex, with more escapes of many other kinds: escapes from traditional family roles, escapes from traditional lifestyles in general, escapes from reality and from life (though this is more of a Houdinian disappearing act than anything else).

Kavalier & Clay is a long read, true, but it is so well written that one is constantly driven forward in the narrative. I find recently that I am increasingly dissatisfied with the ends of novels. I realized reading Kavalier & Clay why that is. So many novels I read tend to stop in the middle of something, with no sense of finality. You can get away with this if you are Zora Neale Hurston and end on a beautiful metaphor as in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and, naturally, if you are Toni Morrison you can get away with this as well by ending on a beautiful sentence. If your point is that there is no finality, I think this is also acceptable. However, when a book doesn't have a great finish and just fizzles out (like Life of Pi), I lose my faith in the entire book. Thank you, Chabon, for writing me a definitive and beautiful ending. Chabon chooses to end on the names of his protagonists written hastily on a calling card, and this is a powerful image to end such a colossal and moving book. So much of Kavalier & Clay relies on faith and dream, and I could not be more pleased that Chabon allowed his readers to keep theirs in his book.