Trevor Burrows#ReadingNotes thread for 2026!
Going to try my best to corral my reading notes in this thread this year, making it easier to mute/filter (if you desire).
So first sentences, running commentary, etc. will be posted as responses to this thread.
"Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."
-- First sentence of Cervantes, *Don Quixote*
---
Started this morning. Reading notes will be tucked in this thread.
#FirstSentences #Cervantes #DonQuixote #Bookstodon #NowReading
With my reading routines really out of joint, I had a hard time deciding where to go next. I decided to take a hard left and start Don Quixote.
Over the last few months, just about every book I've read has mentioned Quixote in one way or another, fiction and NF and even one book of poetry. I'd taken it for a sign and bought the Grossman translation a month ago. I already like it quite a bit more than another translation I had from a while back.
This will be my first full read-through, though I've read a number of its more famous scenes and passages -- and of course know the general story pretty well. Plan to read pretty casually, three or four chapters a day, which means it should take a month or thereabouts.
"Not very far from here is a place where there are almost two dozen tall beech trees, and there's not one that doesn't have the name of Marcela carved and written on its smooth bark, and at the top of some there's a crown carved into the tree, as if the lover were saying even more clearly that Marcela wears and deserves the crown more than any other human beauty."
-- Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XII
I wonder: what is our earliest literary reference to carving names of an inamorata into a tree?
In this and the surrounding chapters, we learn of the story of Grisóstomo and Marcella, which seems to me to have two layers:
Layer 1) Grisóstomo falls in love with Marcella, who all the other men in town also love. Marcella rejects his advances as she does all the others. When Quixote learns of the story, Grisóstomo has just died, apparently by suicide (?), in a fit of despair. All the men are blaming her for Gr's death. She shows up and basically says: I'm a free person, just because I'm beautiful doesn't mean others have any claim to me, if the dude off'd himself that's only a him problem, not a me problem. Way to go Marcella.
Layer 2) Both Grisóstomo and Marcella were wealthy in background but had chosen to become shepherds. Or to play at being shepherds. "Slumming it," essentially.
Which, of course, rings an interesting counterpoint to Quixote's playing at being a knight errant -- for although he is labeled and presented as mad, what is Quixote doing but acting out another life that is not his own.
However: If, initially, we want to mock Gr & Marcella and those around them for this sort of shepherd cosplay, we're given pause by Marcella's monologue:
"I was born free, and in order to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my companions, the clear waters of these streams my mirrors; I communicate my thoughts and my beauty to the trees and to the waters. I am a distant fire and a far-off sword."
Marcella's chosen the life of a shepherdess, at least in part, to escape these MFs who won't stop harassing her!
By the end of her speech, her turn to a "wild" life does not seem to be out of romanticization of that life or its poorer and simpler aspects, but out of a real desire (and need!) for distance from the world.
At the end of Marcella's speech, Don Quixote forbids anyone to follow her. Although it's a very mansplain-y moment -- Marcella clearly doesn't need Q's input or defense, she's just provided that fully for herself -- it's also the first time in the book that Quixote basically gets things right.
That is to say, he hasn't misinterpreted the situation. There are no giants, or villains, or enchanters in his warning.
In this moment, his supposed madness suddenly seems less obviously mad.
Fun side note:
Apparently the cause of death of Grisóstomo is a source of some dispute. Makes sense, it's a little vague.
But it sounds like it's led to some heated words between scholars in the past. From a journal article (citation below), see the last sentence:
"Avalle-Arce agrees with
Castro that an argument can be made for suicide on the basis of the poem, but
he stresses that the text of the prose supports the view of natural death.
Avalle-Arce believes that the presentation of the death is intentionally problematical. [...] Iventosch disagrees with Avalle-Arce's stand and reaffirms Castro's opinion, without referring to Rosales. Since I have no wish to become a participant in the acrimonious
interchange between Avalle-Arce and Iventosch that began with the latter's
article, I shall not reiterate the specific arguments of the two critics."
Citation: JONES, HAROLD G. “Grisóstomo and Don Quixote: Death and Imitation.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 4, no. 1 (1979): 85–92.
Gotta love a scholarly argument about a four-hundred-year-old novel that leads to "acrimonious" words, lol.