Don Quixote
By: Miguel de Cervantes / Translated By: Edith Grossman / Narrated By: George Guidall
Length: 39 hrs and 37 mins
Almost 40 hours went by so very fast!
I gotta tell ya, I did 8 hours of the John Orsmby translation with Roy McMillan as narrator before falling asleep and deciding to try the other version of Don Quixote that I’ve had in my Library for some time now. But what better way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month than by checking out an audiobook that miiiiight be good, here, right here, and NOW? And so while I really had no qualms about McMillan’s narration, I’ve gotta tell ya that George Guidall makes this a version that keeps you awake, that’s a delight to the ears. Plus, the Ormsby phrasing, tho’ feeling not toooo terribly different, seemed a tad reigned in, and the jaunts and jousts of the man of La Mancha, Knight-Errant Extraordinaire, SHOULD have one feeling a tad, if not more, breathless with worry.
Alonso Quixano, an hidalgo nearing 50-years of age, has been reading, reading, reading chivalric works, and absorbing them, obsessed, losing sleep, selling off bits of arable land so that he might add even more books to his library. Something snaps, and suddenly he MUST become a knight seeking to redress wrongs, seeing to justice, fighting for his fair lady. In one fell swoop, he becomes Don Quixote of La Mancha; his tired old horse becomes Rocinante, and the wench down the way, completely unaware of any of this, becomes the fair and dazzling Dulcinea.
During the first part of the book, Quixote actually sees things differently: Windmills are giants, a wine cask is “beheaded”, and its great spillage of wine is blood of a fiendish creature, prostitutes are damsels, and so on and so on. It should be noted that this first part (There are two parts, published ten years apart), also has the stories of many, many characters in it; it’s not just Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Others have poo-poo-ed this Part One as having soooo little to do with our knight-errant as to be tedious at best and worthless should your eye be more jaundiced. I liked it just fine this way, as there’s just something so classical about characters telling other characters’ stories to each other. And it was definitely most amusing to find out where words like “Lothario” come from (From probably the most sinister of the stories read aloud by a character whilst at an Inn).
The second part of the book is more about Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza as people in their own right, not just the characters from this book—we get more of their individual beliefs, get more of them as their relationship develops, get more of who they become, how they grow, during the escapades of this part. And I like it just fine this way also. Sancho Panza is given his dream of a governorship, and he comes to learn that there’s waaaay more to being a governor than simply kicking back and letting the money and jewels flow in—he’s at the beck and call of all his people, is expected to defend them to his dying breath… and that’s just NOT Sancho Panza’s way!
This governorship, by the way, is part of a Duchess and Duke’s idea of a joke which also includes playing pranks on Don Quixote as well. Which is where I found the book to be disquieting: In Part 1, people fear Don Quixote’s madness, want to cure him even if that means condemning him to a life of boredom and without imagination and romance. In Part 2, people see the madness and, with petty cruelty, think nothing of twisting the man around, telling him lies, concocting mean-spirited schemes to cause grave distress. Then too, there are two times that it becomes known that, should Sancho Panza just submit to it, enchantments can be broken if he’ll simply inflict desperate bodily harm upon himself.
I didn’t find this all too terribly amusing, and I kinda feel bad about that. I mean, why can’t I just settle down and not bring 21st century sensibilities into reading and quite possibly immensely enjoying a cleverly written work? Would it be too much to ask that I park my mental health awareness at the door and get on with listening? Uhm, yeah, it kinda would be too much: At each step of our two heroes’ journeys, I was firmly against the barber and the priest plotting and lying their way into getting Don Quixote back to his home purged of books of chivalry (Gone in a big ol’ bonfire!); and I couldn’t quite chuckle at how the Duchess and Duke sneered at the men, at how they manipulated such fine aspirations (Tho’ yeh yeh yeh: Panza wanting to milk a governorship dry and suck all its wealth from it did indeed require a lesson to be taught, but… ).
And here I’m gonna blame George Guidall for my views because the man just did Every. Single. Character so very well, capturing their sneering, capturing their slyness, capturing their glib and often self-righteous glee. So it’s not MY 21st century sensibilities not being parked at the door; it’s Guidall’s awesome ability to convey a MULtitude of characters, to capture their emotional baselines, to deliver each escapade, each prank, so that the listener always feeeeels SOMEthing (In my case, disquiet…). Seriously, I can’t think of any more seasoned narrator who could’ve performed this tale so well, with such ease and such emotional and dramatic depth.
So here I am, in my 50s and baaaarely getting around to Don Quixote. Would I have enjoyed it more, with less guilt and quibbling if I’d read it at, say, 12 or 13-years old? Probably.
But I refuuuuuse to feel badly for simply wanting only good to come to our two brave and enduring companions, to the loyalty they grew to show each other, to the goodness of their hearts, even if they did blow anger-gaskets at times. Even if that does make me annoyingly PC about mental health.
Yeh yeh yeh: Wikipedia was right (Of all things to say!). The way the book’s been viewed has changed over the centuries and with the passing of time, the building of history.
And I want MY version, my take, to have a happy ending…
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