Don Quixote: Book 4: Chapters 28-37: 12/13/08

Here I am in final book of Don Quixote. It takes up the remaining two thirds of the novel's length. As it's so long, I'm reading only ten chapters at a time until I reach the end.

Book One is Sr. Quixada's transformation into Don Quixote. Book Two is funeral of a man who like Quixada had decided to live the fantasy of his books. Book Three finds Quixote face to face with a real knight. Book Four will hopefully bring the themes of the first three books together.

The first ten chapters though are mostly filler. In the previous books the adventure novels Quixada is so much a fan of have only been alluded to. Now nearly fifty of the eighty pages is devoted to excerpts from a romance similar to Romeo and Juliet (1597) but with more couples and more derring-do. Given that the play and the novel are almost contemporaries, it's no surprise to me to see the similarity between the fictional novel and the bard's play.

In the "real world ", news of Quixote's exploits have begun to spread well beyond La Mancha. Along with the news comes unfulfilled promises of fame and fortune. Sancho Panza gets taken in by his own greedy thoughts and Don Quixote has to put him in his place.

That pretty much sums up the first ten chapters of the last book. There's not as much tightly packed substance as the first couple books.

You can see the Tony Johannot illustrations that I've scanned on a special page I'm building. A big part of the fun of reading Don Quixote are the illustrations. I'm only processing images for the section I'm currently reading.

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