Your paper recently printed that a society of authors and critics had nominated Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote has the greatest work of human literature ("Your Summer Reading List Just Got Longer," February 29). This is impossible since neither that group nor any other has ever read it. I am the only human alive who has finished both bloated volumes of this alleged classic and can certify that no other has made the journey.
What is famous from this book? Quixote's dementia, fondness for knights, Sancho the sidekick, riding on a donkey, fighting giants that are actually windmills, and perhaps thinking women are royalty when they aren't. That's it. It's all that's reliable in any adaptation and any reference joke to the text. Your paragraph on the great novel's content barely contains all these facts.
Sir: these details all transpire in the first fifty pages of what is one thousand pages long. If anyone else had ever finished it, they would both be capable of referencing later anecdotes, and have recognize how incredibly redundant the jokes at Quixote's expense become. In either case, it cannot be the greatest work of literature, only the greatest scarecrow to literacy.
Same goes with Proust. I got a quarter of the way through Swann's Way and realized it was not only impossible to read, but nobody did anything!
ReplyDeleteI'll make sure to only read Don Quixote if I get a life sentnence and have no other books in my cell.
What do you mean I haven't read it? I read the Cliff's Notes. Doesn't that count?
ReplyDeleteI read it! Oh wait, no, that was the musical. Never mind.
ReplyDeleteThomas Hardy take note.
ReplyDeleteI read it. I like the transition from V. One to Two (Scratch that - it's brilliant) and Sancho's governing. I even liked the pastoral, but I don't think that was intentional.
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