7 ms·

“Don Quixote” as a manual for living

71 points by drjohnson 5y ago

photojosh 5y ago
I read Don Quixote as a teen, in Spanish, and reading this now makes me think I very definitely read an abridged version! It was one of the novels behind René Girard's early development of his theory of mimetic desire+, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel ([0] is a review). I'm fascinated that OP sees the book as offering subtle life advice, while Girard sees it as an analysis of an aspect of human nature we all share. +as made famous by Peter Thiel... but there's much more to the theory than just a paradigm to build social media on. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/feb/08/theory-mimetic-desire https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/feb/08/theo...
DantesKite 5y ago
The only people who praise this book are literature majors. It was a disappointment from beginning to end. I couldn't understand why people thought it was so great. It didn't feel like an epic. Maybe for its time it was fun to read, but you really have to be deprived of all stimuli to enjoy it (unless you're a literature professor who has to read it). Like maybe stay in a prison cell for a few months. Then yea, it's a pretty fun read. It's certainly interesting as a cultural artifact. If you wanted to buy a book explaining the Don Quixote craze, how it introduced parody characters to the mainstream, that would be an interesting book. And I have nothing against Miguel de Cervantes. My gripe is with the people who recommend this book because it was required reading for their literature major, next to Moby Dick and Shakespeare. Part of me thinks it's so celebrated because it's such a big book. It's like some kind of weird d*ck measuring contest if you want to seem cultured and learned. It felt like one literal crazy dude going on disappointing adventures and then (spoilers) it just ends with him dying, having regretting everything he did, which in my mind, sums up the book pretty well. It wasn't 100% bad. There are moments where it's redeeming, but it doesn't live up to the hype; it doesn't even live up to being average. I strongly recommend people with a sense of taste do anything else with their life. Like if you're not part of the literature cognoscenti and don't mundanely read something just because it's assigned to you, skip this book. You can literally do anything else and it would be more interesting. Watch paint dry and snails race. You can use Don Quixote as a door stop.
- blairbeckwith 5y ago
  This is almost certainly an example of the Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope[1], where older things seem boring and lame today, because the state of the art has moved forward so much, even though they were completely groundbreaking and genre defining when they came out. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - strken 5y ago
    I was alive and of young TV-watching age when Seinfeld was still running. I hated it then, and I still don't like it now. Sometimes things the rest of the world loves just don't grab us. My favourite book is the Count of Monte Cristo, but I couldn't finish the Three Musketeers, to give another example. Same author, same era, but one grabbed me and the other didn't.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      The thing i hated about Seinfeld was the format: sitcom with canned laughter. The content could be interesting if I could just get past the format . I couldn’t. I’m with you.
- antiterra 5y ago
  The Don Quixote we are delivered is usually two books, and I think the first is far superior to the second. Either way, they are two different kinds of books published years apart that we are given as one. Much of the genius of Don Quixote is the satirical take on Chivalric Romances that were popular at the time. He uses tropes from those stories, mocks them, and expands the scope of the narrative. Of course, this and the political context aren’t particularly present to the modern reader. Even though the book is pioneering and inventive, so were early computers that filled rooms; yet, outside of their novelty and significance, they would bore anyone with a smartphone.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
My favorite t-shirt: https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Tilting-at-Windmills-Don-Quixote-Gustave-Dore-by-forgottenbeauty/36466940.1YYVU https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Tilting-at-Windmills-Don...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rnoorda 5y ago
I read Don Quixote in school, but it's been a long time. In my mind, the "canon" version is now Man of La Mancha which, as the article notes, "could not be more distant" from the original. I find the same has happened with The Secret Garden and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I'm not immediately convinced that Don Quixote is a more effective manual for living than other classic works of literature, but it's interesting enough to make me consider a reread. I'm sure it would be a completely new experience.
colechristensen 5y ago
If the length is imposing to you (which it generally is), it’s good to know that what you get is almost always two separate works published ten years apart together as part one and part two. Part 1 is relatively short and hilarious and can be very much read and enjoyed on its own. It is perhaps easier to get tired of the style in part two. It also matters which translation you read.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  The funny part of Part 1 was when a local started a book-burning, because DQ had gone crazy after reading too many books, and thus these volumes were tragically lost forever. The shocking part was when some side character recounted an incident which befell him in America, and realizing that the Americas were contemporary.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > It also matters which translation you read. Have you got a recommendation?
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Edith Grossman
SomaticPirate 5y ago
Its funny that the author puts down the play, The Man of La Mancha, while describing the importance of the text. The play is elegant and created great works of its own like “The impossible dream” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Dream_(The_Quest) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Dream_(The_Ques...) which I would argue distills of the most poignant points about living a good life. Honestly, I barely remember Don Quixote but the lyrics to the Impossible Dream I can easily recall.
- stan_rogers 5y ago
  Perhaps, but Man of La Mancha misses the whole point of the novel. Alonzo Quixano was not a noble man - translated into today's world, he'd be a full-on QAnon type.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    I found the play more of a meta comment on the book, as if it was deliberately misrepresented to make fun of the audience.
lalos 5y ago
I would recommend to advanced Spanish learners Lathrop's Spanish version with English footnotes. They help with the trickier and mostly uncommon words or historical context.
max-ibel 5y ago
Couple of other books I would recommend: Revolt of Angles, Candide, The blue peril. No particular reason other them being obscure (on HN at least) and pretty good reads.
khazhoux 5y ago
Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)
- DaveExeter 5y ago
  Of course! It's not like it is a long book. Now Metamagical Themas is a different story.
  - antman 5y ago
    Metamagical Themas, a crossover of Don Quixote and GEB
- katzgrau 5y ago
  I have Knuth's TACP sitting proudly on my bookshelf and ... I flipped through it a couple of times thinking, wow, I'm never going to read this am I.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    You should just pick a random section and start reading; or better still find a section relevant to something you have worked with before. Knuth is a clear writer and pretty funny, and there is a lot of great insight packed in there. Note that TAOCP is more a reference book for professional researchers than a book to skim quickly cover-to-cover.
  - chefandy 5y ago
    Yeah— that's one of those tomes that takes a superhuman amount of will for most people to push through if they're not being compelled by university course work. Very well-written but it's just a lot of information to absorb. When I was a teenager, just before I started more seriously getting into programming on the school computers, a Russian friend asked his dad— a soviet university trained software engineer— how he could learn to code. His dad handed him a his stack of Knuth and said "read that and then get back to me." Of course, the kid read 10 pages of Fundamental Algorithms, put the book down, and never tried to learn how to code ever again. Why would he have? As far as he was concerned, the very first steps were a big pile of confusing theory that wasn't bringing him closer to his goal of doing some fun projects with a computer at any point in the near future. He had to absorb all that just to start? Forget it. Looking back, I think his dad probably thought it was funny and probably even joked with his coworkers about it... but I wonder how different my friend's path would have been if his dad handed him a copy of Learning Perl (it was the mid 90s) and helped him get ActivePerl installed on his machine. If your nerd machismo is so intense that you're alienating your own teen kid with it, you really need to reconsider your life strategy.
drewcoo 5y ago
The entirety of https://octavian.substack.com/ https://octavian.substack.com/ is hilarious. Is it here because it was composed by AI?
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Or as George Bush might have said, "Why is the Classics?"
asdff 5y ago
Does anyone have a preferred english translation for Don Quixote?
- robinhoodexe 5y ago
  I have only read the Edith Grossmann translation but found it quite good. I've read somewhere that it is not the most comical translation, but strives to be correct in a sense. Also, all the "old" words are described in footnotes, for those of us who are not experts on medieval litterature or 1600s ship concepts.
- ttonkytonk 5y ago
  I read the first 100 or so pages of the Starkie translation, but lost it and later read I believe the Cohen translation in its entirety. I thought the Starkie version was clearly superior for the part I read.
ctdonath 5y ago
I’ll have to take on DQ again with this perspective. Now, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - that is a manual for living. Many quotes are words to abide by. “Where it is objectively inaccurate, the Guide strives to be definitively inaccurate.” “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” “Who can rule, when nobody who wants to rule can be allowed to?” etc. The raging absurdities are fantastically insightful.
grapist420 5y ago
> The majority of readers, at least American readers, first learn of Don Quixote through Man of La Mancha, a syrupy and formulaic Broadway musical or high school lit class
anthk 5y ago
Along Don Quixote, I'd suggest Lazarillo de Tormes, too. A rascal/rogue guiding an blind oldie man.
GoodJokes 5y ago
Read another book. No, not Harry Potter.

71 points by drjohnson 5y ago

I read Don Quixote as a teen, in Spanish, and reading this now makes me think I very definitely read an abridged version! It was one of the novels behind René Girard's early development of his theory of mimetic desire+, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel ([0] is a review). I'm fascinated that OP sees the book as offering subtle life advice, while Girard sees it as an analysis of an aspect of human nature we all share. +as made famous by Peter Thiel... but there's much more to the theory than just a paradigm to build social media on. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/feb/08/theory-mimetic-desire https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/feb/08/theo...

DantesKite 5y ago

The only people who praise this book are literature majors. It was a disappointment from beginning to end. I couldn't understand why people thought it was so great. It didn't feel like an epic. Maybe for its time it was fun to read, but you really have to be deprived of all stimuli to enjoy it (unless you're a literature professor who has to read it). Like maybe stay in a prison cell for a few months. Then yea, it's a pretty fun read. It's certainly interesting as a cultural artifact. If you wanted to buy a book explaining the Don Quixote craze, how it introduced parody characters to the mainstream, that would be an interesting book. And I have nothing against Miguel de Cervantes. My gripe is with the people who recommend this book because it was required reading for their literature major, next to Moby Dick and Shakespeare. Part of me thinks it's so celebrated because it's such a big book. It's like some kind of weird d*ck measuring contest if you want to seem cultured and learned. It felt like one literal crazy dude going on disappointing adventures and then (spoilers) it just ends with him dying, having regretting everything he did, which in my mind, sums up the book pretty well. It wasn't 100% bad. There are moments where it's redeeming, but it doesn't live up to the hype; it doesn't even live up to being average. I strongly recommend people with a sense of taste do anything else with their life. Like if you're not part of the literature cognoscenti and don't mundanely read something just because it's assigned to you, skip this book. You can literally do anything else and it would be more interesting. Watch paint dry and snails race. You can use Don Quixote as a door stop.

blairbeckwith 5y ago
This is almost certainly an example of the Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope[1], where older things seem boring and lame today, because the state of the art has moved forward so much, even though they were completely groundbreaking and genre defining when they came out. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- strken 5y ago
  I was alive and of young TV-watching age when Seinfeld was still running. I hated it then, and I still don't like it now. Sometimes things the rest of the world loves just don't grab us. My favourite book is the Count of Monte Cristo, but I couldn't finish the Three Musketeers, to give another example. Same author, same era, but one grabbed me and the other didn't.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    The thing i hated about Seinfeld was the format: sitcom with canned laughter. The content could be interesting if I could just get past the format . I couldn’t. I’m with you.
antiterra 5y ago
The Don Quixote we are delivered is usually two books, and I think the first is far superior to the second. Either way, they are two different kinds of books published years apart that we are given as one. Much of the genius of Don Quixote is the satirical take on Chivalric Romances that were popular at the time. He uses tropes from those stories, mocks them, and expands the scope of the narrative. Of course, this and the political context aren’t particularly present to the modern reader. Even though the book is pioneering and inventive, so were early computers that filled rooms; yet, outside of their novelty and significance, they would bore anyone with a smartphone.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

My favorite t-shirt: https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Tilting-at-Windmills-Don-Quixote-Gustave-Dore-by-forgottenbeauty/36466940.1YYVU https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Tilting-at-Windmills-Don...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rnoorda 5y ago

I read Don Quixote in school, but it's been a long time. In my mind, the "canon" version is now Man of La Mancha which, as the article notes, "could not be more distant" from the original. I find the same has happened with The Secret Garden and The Scarlet Pimpernel. I'm not immediately convinced that Don Quixote is a more effective manual for living than other classic works of literature, but it's interesting enough to make me consider a reread. I'm sure it would be a completely new experience.

colechristensen 5y ago

If the length is imposing to you (which it generally is), it’s good to know that what you get is almost always two separate works published ten years apart together as part one and part two. Part 1 is relatively short and hilarious and can be very much read and enjoyed on its own. It is perhaps easier to get tired of the style in part two. It also matters which translation you read.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
The funny part of Part 1 was when a local started a book-burning, because DQ had gone crazy after reading too many books, and thus these volumes were tragically lost forever. The shocking part was when some side character recounted an incident which befell him in America, and realizing that the Americas were contemporary.
lostlogin 5y ago
> It also matters which translation you read. Have you got a recommendation?
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Edith Grossman

SomaticPirate 5y ago

Its funny that the author puts down the play, The Man of La Mancha, while describing the importance of the text. The play is elegant and created great works of its own like “The impossible dream” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Dream_(The_Quest) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impossible_Dream_(The_Ques...) which I would argue distills of the most poignant points about living a good life. Honestly, I barely remember Don Quixote but the lyrics to the Impossible Dream I can easily recall.

stan_rogers 5y ago
Perhaps, but Man of La Mancha misses the whole point of the novel. Alonzo Quixano was not a noble man - translated into today's world, he'd be a full-on QAnon type.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I found the play more of a meta comment on the book, as if it was deliberately misrepresented to make fun of the audience.

lalos 5y ago

I would recommend to advanced Spanish learners Lathrop's Spanish version with English footnotes. They help with the trickier and mostly uncommon words or historical context.

max-ibel 5y ago

Couple of other books I would recommend: Revolt of Angles, Candide, The blue peril. No particular reason other them being obscure (on HN at least) and pretty good reads.

khazhoux 5y ago

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two. (c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

DaveExeter 5y ago
Of course! It's not like it is a long book. Now Metamagical Themas is a different story.
- antman 5y ago
  Metamagical Themas, a crossover of Don Quixote and GEB
katzgrau 5y ago
I have Knuth's TACP sitting proudly on my bookshelf and ... I flipped through it a couple of times thinking, wow, I'm never going to read this am I.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  You should just pick a random section and start reading; or better still find a section relevant to something you have worked with before. Knuth is a clear writer and pretty funny, and there is a lot of great insight packed in there. Note that TAOCP is more a reference book for professional researchers than a book to skim quickly cover-to-cover.
- chefandy 5y ago
  Yeah— that's one of those tomes that takes a superhuman amount of will for most people to push through if they're not being compelled by university course work. Very well-written but it's just a lot of information to absorb. When I was a teenager, just before I started more seriously getting into programming on the school computers, a Russian friend asked his dad— a soviet university trained software engineer— how he could learn to code. His dad handed him a his stack of Knuth and said "read that and then get back to me." Of course, the kid read 10 pages of Fundamental Algorithms, put the book down, and never tried to learn how to code ever again. Why would he have? As far as he was concerned, the very first steps were a big pile of confusing theory that wasn't bringing him closer to his goal of doing some fun projects with a computer at any point in the near future. He had to absorb all that just to start? Forget it. Looking back, I think his dad probably thought it was funny and probably even joked with his coworkers about it... but I wonder how different my friend's path would have been if his dad handed him a copy of Learning Perl (it was the mid 90s) and helped him get ActivePerl installed on his machine. If your nerd machismo is so intense that you're alienating your own teen kid with it, you really need to reconsider your life strategy.

drewcoo 5y ago

The entirety of https://octavian.substack.com/ https://octavian.substack.com/ is hilarious. Is it here because it was composed by AI?

a9h74j 5y ago
Or as George Bush might have said, "Why is the Classics?"

asdff 5y ago

Does anyone have a preferred english translation for Don Quixote?

robinhoodexe 5y ago
I have only read the Edith Grossmann translation but found it quite good. I've read somewhere that it is not the most comical translation, but strives to be correct in a sense. Also, all the "old" words are described in footnotes, for those of us who are not experts on medieval litterature or 1600s ship concepts.
ttonkytonk 5y ago
I read the first 100 or so pages of the Starkie translation, but lost it and later read I believe the Cohen translation in its entirety. I thought the Starkie version was clearly superior for the part I read.

ctdonath 5y ago

I’ll have to take on DQ again with this perspective. Now, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - that is a manual for living. Many quotes are words to abide by. “Where it is objectively inaccurate, the Guide strives to be definitively inaccurate.” “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” “Who can rule, when nobody who wants to rule can be allowed to?” etc. The raging absurdities are fantastically insightful.

grapist420 5y ago

> The majority of readers, at least American readers, first learn of Don Quixote through Man of La Mancha, a syrupy and formulaic Broadway musical or high school lit class

anthk 5y ago

Along Don Quixote, I'd suggest Lazarillo de Tormes, too. A rascal/rogue guiding an blind oldie man.

GoodJokes 5y ago

Read another book. No, not Harry Potter.