Lectures on Don Quixote
by Vladimir Nabokov

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• ISBN13: 9780156495400
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Lectures on Don Quixote

Book Review: A Breath of Fresh Air, by fermed
Summary: 5 Stars

I admit to having had a life-long aversion to Don Q., an aversion that is rooted in early efforts to make me read "children's versions" of the book by guise of educating me. I suspect that such dislike is widely shared by those who have dared attempt the original text, or even its modern translations. Those who love the story are likely to have limited their sampling to the musical version of the book: "Man of La Mancha."

And so it was truly a pleasure to follow Nabokov in his extraordinary feat of dissection. Nobody in nearly 400 years of Spanish critical appraisals of this awful book has ever come close to exposing the work as thoroughly and meticulously as Nabokov does in the six lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1952. Spanish critics of Cervantes are mainly hagiographers, incapable of noting the Emperor's nakedness. They are apt to compare Cervantes to Shakespeare (don't they wish!), a comparion which Nabokov insightfully reduces to this:

"The only matter in which Cervantes and Shakespeare are equals is the matter of influence, of spiritual irrigation -- I have in view the long shadow cast upon receptive posterity of a created image which may continue to live independently from the book itself. Shakespeare's plays, however, will continue to live apart from the shadow they project." By implication, Don Q. would not.

Nabokov even exposes the canard, much repeated in Spain, that Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same day in 1616. They did not. It is true that each died on April 23 of that year, but they lived in different calendars, with a ten day gap between their true dates of defunction.

Before embarking on his lectures, Nabokov abstracted each of the 126 chapters of the two volumes, citing their essential elements. These abstracts are included in the book. In addition, he surveyed the work noting Don Q's "victories" and "defeats," a monumental task which lays bare each of his encounters and battles (40 all told), each scored as a "victory" or a "defeat." He comments, in amazement, about one critic who had said "Never, by any chance, does Don Quixote win."

Not so. When all the battles are added up the score is precisely 20/20. Don Q. won as many as he lost.

When Nabokov called this "one of the most bitter and barbarous books even penned" it did not gain him friends among the professional academics of the ivory towers; but the observation is true and constitutes one of the many explanatory notes about the book that allows the readers to understand their dislike (if they have a dislike) for this work.

Only six lectures. One of the great anatomical feats by that wizard Nabokov. It is not necessary to know the Qixote in order to enjoy this tour de force; in addition, anyone who writes fiction will love (and benefit from) the type of deep structural analysis to which Nobokov subjects this novel. Nabokov's handywork is a beautiful excercise in education "as it should be," and therefore it is worth the time and effort to read it.

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