2016. There may never be another year during which I read so many of the Great Classic Novels for the first time. Let me list them: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevksy, Ulysses by James Joyce, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. I also chucked in a few of the great plays for good measure: Hamlet, King Lear, and Twelfth Night (this one I'd read before, and remains a favourite), all by William Shakespeare.
As a bonus, I also had the chance to read two of the most beautiful and startling philosophical treatises: On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche.
But back to the novels. It is difficult to do justice to any those great works individually, let alone all of them. Their collective influence on arts and culture in the West is practically immeasurable.
The epic scope and narrative invention of War and Peace is legendary, but it is even more breathtaking when actually read. The array of characters, the depth of their characterisation and the movements of history combine to provide rich nourishment for the soul, and reveals the sophistication and nobility of the Russian spirit.
Moby Dick was a real surprise for its intellectual ambition. One expects adventure on the high seas, and instead is given something much more: the enterprising American spirit as seen at once through its cultural links to Europe and Britain (Shakespeare looms large) and forging its own way, expanding, pondering the nature of its own spirit.
Ulysses is a juggernaut of linguistic invention and deliberate intellectual playfulness. It is perhaps the least accessible of these great classics, and perhaps also the most divisive, but its intellectual rewards are great and in a sense it remains ahead of the times.
But it is Don Quixote for which I want to reserve the most emphatic recommendation, in part because I believe it is the most easily overlooked, and too readily dismissed as antiquated or irrelevant. It is not. It is unique among nearly all of the great classics for being truly, laugh-out-loud funny. More than 400 years have not dimmed the humour. How much funnier still it must have seemed to contemporaneous ears who understood the subtler references that are lost to time and translation.
Don Quixote is not only funny, but also full of pathos. The main character centres in himself something of both the ridiculous and the sublime, and while we are treated to the former most of the time, the shape of the latter emerges over time, especially in Volume 2.
Personally, I found Volume 2 to be even better than Volume 1. Its latter two thirds are as funny as anything in Volume 1, and yet it also treats of more serious matters. I particularly marvelled at and appreciated the story's innovative reference to characters' knowledge of the first volume, published ten years before it. This is an ingenious device that seems more at home in the 20th or even the 21st century than in a novel from the early 17th century. If there can be any doubt that Don Quixote is inventive and linguistically imaginative, this fact alone should dispel it at once.
It is a pity that English readers (myself included) cannot appreciate the full craftiness of the language at work, in particular the contrast between the deluded knight errant's Old Castillian and his compatriots' modern Spanish.
All the other classics seem to take themselves a bit too seriously when we compare them to Don Quixote, and it is only when placed next to Shakespeare that we find a similar use of comic devices in great literature.
2016 marked 400 years since Shakespeare died, and all year long his works were commemorated with performances that are set to continue well into the New Year and beyond. How many of us knew that 2016 also marked 400 years since the passing of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote?
Remedy that neglect immediately, and place Don Quixote on your reading list!
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