New Worlds

Found ourselves established in Maison KL yesterday evening in time for me to read the final pages of Don Quixote here, and return my sixty-year-old copy to the shelves from whence it came. Was surprised to be reminded just how quickly Cervantes has his final illness descend upon our knight errant. Before my most recent reading I tended, from what I could remember, to think of the chapters as setting a richly melancholy tone after Don Quixote's defeat by the White Knight, but actually there's quite a bit of lively talk about setting up as arcadian shepherds whilst the one year penalty for his defeat is waited out. It's only with the beginning of the brief final chapter that we learn of the death of our hero, and this was not in any sense inevitable from preceding events - there's no sense of him pining away.

Cervantes handles this masterfully, it seems to me, as he does everything in Part 2. There is a minimum of sentimentality about the death of our hero, and a maximum of feeling. Following his defeat in the joust there is a powerful symbolic sense of events hurrying to their necessary close, but this does not translate into the kind of lingering wistfulness we are so familiar with these days from the movies and their like. I also got the feeling that Cervantes had recognised long before this, possibly towards the end of Part 1, that he was no longer creating characters in the usual sense, but rather knew he had been gifted archetypes that had a kind of existence beyond his text - and I don't just mean in the rival account of the Don's adventures he has such a good time lampooning towards the end of Part 2. My guess is that Cervantes knew he could keep up the dialogue between Sancho and his master for as long as he liked, the adventures themselves always being secondary to the characters' reflections upon them - and sought closure simply when he recognised time was running out for their creator.

I also finished the third book in The Saga of the Swamp Thing today, my holiday reading in the simplest sense of blissfully soaking up the purest, most effortless pleasure that fiction can afford. I must say, I am baffled by the fact that so many folks just don't seem to really read at all. What would life be like without other worlds to escape to?