The ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha

I walked into bar a week back and was served a beer by a 20 something girl with a strong accent. What part of the world are you from I asked. Spain she said. After a bit of small talk about her backpacking etc I mentioned I was nearing the end of Don Quixote. Why would you read that she asked? Forced to read it at school and hated it. Interestingly I had had the same conversation a while back with a friend of mine who had been made to read it at school and had bad memories.
I know I too would have hated it back in the day. So now into my fast approaching old age I can honestly say Don Quixote has been a long but enjoyable adventure and I understand its place in literary history but yeah, glad I did not read it at school. Reckon I would have detested it.

But what do I write after 400 years of everyone else writing about it? I suppose I could put it into a modern context.

Don Quixote suffers from a delusional form of mental illness, lives in the past. Old white males of my generation in western society seriously suffer from a form of this by pining for their youth. His attacking windmills, as one example, was a form of mad slapstick that I read took the Spanish speaking world by storm. Think the same with say Charlie Chaplin at the turn of last century. Recently in South Australia windmills were blamed for the entire power blackout of the state. Maybe they needed to call their massive storm Don Quixote.

There is a hint of sexual liberalism that back when written would have been the equivalent of say the 60's cultural revolution. An aghast older generation and a younger reader know that sex sells. The tale of Anselmo, Lothario and Camilla would have been a sensation I would have thought, a wife swapping tale for the times. It has certain Soap Opera connotations that parallel modern life, everything from Dallas through to Neighbours. Did I say wife swapping? Forget that, this is the journey into the world of asking your best mate to shag your wife.

A few others? The Captive tells another tale that would have taken in the religious tensions of the time and are not far from being, again, a parallel for our times. Love conquering all with an enthralling adventure of religious intolerance. But then we go to the other extreme of a journey into sado-masochism by a couple of wealthy aristocrats mistreating the mentally ill for their own personal kicks. This gets lots of columns in the tabloids nowadays. I even read an item by an economist talking monetary theory within this book.

Something for everyone it seems.