don quixote (cervantes, tr. edith grossman)

It is, evidently, an absurd task to try and write about Quixote in a few lines here, as though this were just another book. Which it is, but it isn’t.

Some of the reasons why it isn’t.

On a most obvious level, no book I have ever read has taken me as long to read as the twin volumes of Don Quixote. It has taken me this long to read in part because of its length. But also because I was in no kind of a hurry. There is no urgency to the reading. A factor which modern publishing criteria might decry. There was no urgency, as I knew that I was setting out on a journey with Sancho and his master, and they were in no hurry. There was no dramatic imperative. No pot of narrative gold at the end of the rainbow. They were drifting through Spain and the reader is invited to drift along with them. Is the reader accompanying Sancho Panza and Don Quixote on their journey, or are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza accompanying the reader on their journey? Sin dudas, it is a little bit of both. The two wanderers have kept me company through the peaks and troughs of this year’s Covid, through my absence from the story of Censor, through times of exile and languor, through work, hangovers and arguments. In which, sense, they, and their author, have been part of my life this year, just as much as I have been part of theirs.

On another level, with reference to the author, because this is a novel which is, as is well known, the godparent of all Western novels. When one says ‘all’ one means the novels of all the European and by default American canon. One of the most remarkable things Cervantes achieves, centuries before the words post-modernism or nouveau roman or Joyce or Derrida or anything else you care to throw at the fan might have been coined, is the construction of a text which is also an auto-commentary. Again, noting that these notes are barely enough to flesh out an idea about an idea, one has to register the difference between the first book, which adopts what might once have been termed a more naturalistic feel, and the second which blows naturalism and all its shiny towers to smithereens. The number of times I found myself highlighting a passage, astonished by the author’s audaciousness, was many. I realise that this too, was a writer working within a context and a tradition, but the originality of thought and execution and the playfulness that goes with it, is a constant delight. The book sings and the author sings with it, rarely letting the reader forget it. As an English soul, steeped to some extent in contemporary British approaches to the novel, Cervantes’ approach felt like a dousing of iced champagne over the crowd of po-faced guardians of the keys to the literary kingdom.

The novel is also godparent, to every other style in the canon. Two examples. Firstly, the comic book. The violence in part one is gratuitous, but entirely in keeping with the Kapows!!! of any comic. No man or woman could withstand the punishment meted out to Quixote, Sancho, Rocinante and the ass. Violence is a trope, a device, a way of grabbing the reader’s attention and subverting reality.

Secondly, there are the novels within the novels of the opening section. These stories, of maidens and their lovers, of overheard conversations, misunderstandings and perilous outcomes, are nevertheless rooted in a far more naturalistic register. These are the stepsisters to Shakespeare’s lovers, characters who feel as though they might have fallen out of Measure for Measure or Much Ado, but they are also the godparents of the naturalistic novels of Marias, Austen or Eliot, to name three at random. The writer, whilst at other points in the book subverting notions of emotional truth, burlesquing notions of courtly love, finds space and time within the novel to present the other side of the coin.

All of which is like being presented with a film script which contains every genre, from fantasy to romcom to drama to Western to horror, a script which in usual terms has no chance of ‘working’ only for it to prove to be the king and queen of cinema, against all logic.

I was talking to a friend, Nicole, about the novel, who described how she had to read it for school, chapter by chapter, demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of every episode. She related how she would wake in the mornings and read a chapter in bed. Her mother would hear her laughing, and ask what she was laughing about. Oh nothing, she would say, just Quixote. Cervantes invites one to laugh at every opportunity, he understands that laughter binds the reader to the book, across the divide of time. The essentials of narration sit side by side with the most abstruse elements of meta-fiction. When you’re in need of company, feeling lonesome, when the world isn’t cutting it, there will always by the travails of a man out of his time, sagacious fools, brilliant crazies, to keep you going, to remind you of the charms of having been born a human. 

the alienist (machado de assis, tr william l grossman)

Machado de Assis’ slender tome is an effortless masterpieces that feels as though it was written in a day, to be read in an hour. It tells the simple story of the apparently cultured man of science, Simão Bacamarte, who sets up an asylum to study madness in a small Brazilian town. The scientist gradually starts locking up anyone he deems insane, including his wife, bringing about a revolution. However, the revolutionaries also believe in science, and as a result they don’t lock Bacamarte up, or even release his prisoners. Finally, Bacamarte reaches the reasonably logical conclusion that in a mad world, the sane are the truly crazy people, and starts locking people up on that basis. Neither rationality nor irrationality can be trusted. Bacamarte is a brilliant charlatan so convinced of his own genius that he has succeeded in convincing everyone else. If ever you wanted an allegory for what is occurring in present day Brazil, this could scarcely be bettered: Bolsonaro’s Brazil seems to be caught up in the spectacle of re-enacting de Assis’ thesis. In addition it goes to the heart of the issues surrounding notions of scientific rationality as a basis for claiming rights over what might be deemed sanity; an issue which is hot-wired into the Brazilian psyche. As perfect a short novel as you could hope to find, one that reveals that alternative literary strands were alive in kicking in Latin America long before the arrival of Marquez, Borges et al. 

in the night of time (w. antonio muñoz molina, tr. edith grossman)

Plaza Santa Ana, a place where a young American rents a room, living beside washerwomen and labourers The smell of homemade food wafts its way up to her third floor apartment. Caldos, or sopas, tomato based, heavy on the pimenton, earthy flavours which make the most of the leftovers from the day before the day before. Down the road, on Alcala, just off Sol, a politician sits in a bar and consumes vast quantities of prawns and beer. The city hums with a life which reflects the way the capital has become a pole star, integrating every corner of the country, Andaluz, Asturian, Catalan, Galician and so on and so forth. It’s a far cry from the Santa Ana and Calle Alcala of today. Today, Santa Ana is full of dainty restaurants with prices geared towards the tourists. Sol is a catch-all, gaudy to the point of ugliness. As such, Molina’s novel, which is about many things, feels like a lament for a lost Spain, a Madrid which has been appropriated by the tourist dollar. The first time I ever visited Madrid, it still had a provincial feel; a town for insiders, full of secrets. Now, its secrets have been cast to the wind and it bustles with the energy of a modern, global capital. 

The novel captures Madrid on the eve of the Civil War. It’s framed around the affair conducted by its protagonist, Ignacio Abel, with Judith, a youngish American who is falling in love with him and Madrid. The novel has a double focus. On the one hand it’s a brilliant portrayal of a city which is teetering on the brink of disaster. Day by day, as the affair unfolds, the city steps closer and closer to the abyss, never realising where it will end until it’s too late. Molina details this process immaculately. The reader feels as though they are entering the vortex alongside the characters, many of whom will meet, we know, a tragic end. Hindsight is the novelist’s great weapon, and Molina wields it like a fencing sword. At one point he writes: “How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago.” That strangeness is communicated to the reader, looking on in horror as the net closes. For an English reader in these times, the novel is more than disconcerting, it’s positively scary. 

The secondary focus of the novel is the affair. This too is detailed meticulously. Every step of Judith and Ignacio’s voyage is mapped. The novel itself is framed around Ignacio’s voyage from Penn Station to Rhineland, the university town on the Hudson where he has been commissioned to design a library, (his ticket out of Spain). At the end of this journey, he will meet Judith once again. The novelist never seeks to place his protagonist in a sympathetic light: he’s not merely fleeing Spain, he’s also running away from his family. There’s a coldness to Ignacio which perhaps goes with his chosen profession, a coldness which Judith succeeds in melting. At times it’s hard not to question Ignacio and by implication the author himself. if there’s any part of this novel which felt less than satisfactory to this reader it was the last twenty five pages, which might be said to allow Ignacio to have his cake and eat it.

Nevertheless, this last section cannot take the shine off a novel which succeeds brilliantly in conjuring up the lost world of pre-Civil War Spain, capturing in the process the way in which families and communities were rent asunder. At one point in the novel there’s a barbed reference to Hemingway and the other foreign writers who passed through Spain during the Civil War. In non-Spanish speaking countries, our understanding of that conflict is very much shaped by an outsider’s perspective. Here, in a fine translation by Edith Grossman, Molina recalibrates that, offering a compelling, evocative portrayal of a land teetering on the brink.