I recently finished reading Miguel de Cervantes’s epic novel, Don Quixote. It is a big book. Over 1,000 pages in most print editions, or 39 hours and 18 minutes in the audio edition I employed. I read the first ten chapters through the more conventional sort of reading, back at the beginning of the summer — but then I switched over to an audio version to accompany my summer painting project and finished the last 34 hours of the narrative that way. After a whole summer with Don Quixote, I better understand just how big the book is. In size and length, for sure. But also in terms of its big ideas and the big shadow this book has cast over Western culture and literature over the past 420 years.

Don Quixote blazed new trails when it was written in 1605. It was a sort of proto-novel that stretched its story out over a considerably longer narrative arc than most other stories up to that point in history (the printing press had only been invented about 165 years before the first volume of the book came out). Don Quixote must have felt like a truly “novel” way of storytelling, a threshold to books expanding to what they are today. So that’s certainly a big development.

But the way the story was constructed and the way its characters were developed represented also represented a big leap forward. A longer work of fiction allowed for bigger, more complex, more three-dimensional characters. The two primary protagonists, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, demonstrated an intriguing complexity in their own inner thoughts and in the way they related to each other. The other characters (as well as the reader) were often left wondering whether they should laugh, or cry, or shake their heads in bewilderment at the exploits of this self-appointed, old-fashioned (even at the time) “knight” and his “squire.” The plot moves slowly and slightly (at least from the standpoint of a 21st Century reader) — still, it’s interesting to see the way that a high-minded dreamer and drifter like the title character affects the other, more static, characters with whom he comes into contact. This is a story arc that’s been imitated again and again over the last four centuries — including classics like The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars and The Muppet Movie and literally hundreds of others — which certainly says something about the book’s influence.

But gosh, Don Quixote just feels so slow and herky-jerky. It really does feel like it was written 420 years ago.

The flow of the story reminded me of my high school English class reading of the Medieval Canterbury Tales, only expanded to fill a thousand pages with weird little episodes that don’t fit together all that well and only marginally relate to the bigger story being told. It’s also just hard to explain what the big story really is, but I think Wikipedia’s listing for Don Quixote does a decent job of summarizing the most essential elements of the plot:

The plot revolves around the adventures of a member of the lowest nobility, a hidalgo from La Mancha named Alonso Quijano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight-errant (caballero andante) to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits as his squire a simple farm laborer, Sancho Panza, who brings an earthy wit to Don Quixote’s lofty rhetoric… Don Quixote does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story meant for the annals of all time.

I’m glad that I made it all the way through Don Quixote, but I’m also glad that I made it all the way through Don Quixote and don’t feel any need for a second reading. I don’t know if I can wholeheartedly recommend literary slog to others.

That being said, Don Quixote will always hold a special place in my heart. I’ve known about Don Quixote since my childhood. In fact, I remember originally parsing it as, “Donkey Hotey,” and somehow I tied that phrase to the memory of my Dad (and other civic leaders) playing a game of “Donkey Basketball” in a high school gymnasium, where players were literally mounted on the backs of donkeys. My Dad also kept a wooden sculpture of Don Quixote mounted atop his horse Rocinante on the desk of his office for many years — and since my Dad’s death, that sculpture has come to sit on the desk of my office. Furthermore, when my brother was first establishing himself as an artist, I got a print of his rendering of this sculpture, as it seemed to speak to the Quixotic nature of art and church leadership and some of the other ethereal quests to which the men in our family have devoted themselves. I can sometimes wonder if I’m crazy to have made the choices I’ve made in life, but somehow Don Quixote reminds me that even if I am crazy — that doesn’t necessarily mean that my lack lacks nobility.

For anyone who might wish to absorb more of the story of Don Quixote, I might sooner recommend watching the 1972 film adaptation of the 1965 musical theater production Man of La Mancha, rather than reading the book. Man of La Mancha was inspired by the events of Don Quixote, but it also introduces some adaptations for a more modern audience. It drops huge sub-plots that felt boring and irrelevant (like the section of the book set in the Sierra Morena mountains, involving Cardenio and Dorotea… or the section of the book when the protagonists are entertaining the Duke and Duchess, who seem like cruel “benefactors”). The musical adds more of a love story — giving a real, credible back-story for the title character’s beloved lady Dulcinea. It talks about high-minded dreaming, with an acknowledgement of both its perils and its benefits. And it puts it the whole story to Tony-award-winning music that sticks with one for a long time after listening.