Don Quixote: Book 3: 12/06/08

I took the week of for Thanksgiving. I didn't want to take a two hundred year old book on a five hundred mile car trip just to make a blog post! I'm finding coming back to Don Quixote de la Mancha after the break difficult. I feel like I've lost my momentum.

Book Three is the last of the short books and the longest of them before the massive book four finishes the book. Book four which I will begin to tackle next week is twice as long as the first three books combined.

Book One, as we discussed on November 15, is the part of the story that everyone who has heard of Don Quixote know. Book Two then is the potential tragedy of Quixote's life played out with the funeral of another lover of books, Chrysostom. Book Three then struggles to find its voice being not the clearly parallel story that Book Two is to Book One.

Book Three flounders around at first with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza falling into hard times with their adventuring. Quixote is injured twice, one to the point that he can't walk for the first few chapters and later losing most of his teeth. Sancho Panza then loses his ass and has to ride Rocinante back to Sr. Quixada's estate to seek a new mount.

Near the end of Book Three, Cervantes introduces the tragic story of a knight who failed in battle while trying to defend his lady's honor. Quixote's reaction to the knight's story and the lady's fate will probably play out in Book Four.

Book Three is the lull before the final push to the end. It lacks the humor of the first book and the darkness of the second. It feels rushed with its strung together adventures and disjointed flashbacks.
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