Today April 22 2016 is 400th death anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615)
Julian Gough, ‘Divine Comedy’:
Soledad Puértolas:
“The English have managed to sell Shakespeare as one of the pillars of their
language, because theirs is a more pragmatic country than ours. Spain is not a
place that knows how to acknowledge its culture.”Julian Gough, ‘Divine Comedy’:
“...the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not have a holy
book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no
rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form. The fool's sermon could be
published, could live on. All you learned from Rabelais or Cervantes was to
mock everything sacred, all that went before. Including them.
And the reaction was fierce. Rabelais was jailed for his
wild comedies. Voltaire, praised for his early tragedies, was jailed for his
satires. Cervantes apparently started Don Quixote in a debtors' prison. All had
to flee town on occasion for fear of worse. Printing had to be done abroad, in
secret, and the books smuggled to their destinations. The early years of the
novel look remarkably like a guerrilla war, as pro-Bible forces try to put down
the insurgency of the novel across Europe. Both were fighting for the same
piece of territory: the territory inside your head.
Now a man could invent his own myth and spread it across the
world. And the reader, head bowed over the novel, could have a vision without
religion: a full vision, transmitted through space and time by marks on paper,
using the novelist's arts.
The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the
novelist's abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the
novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast. It can change your entire
internal world. Of course, so can a scientific truth. So can a religious
experience. So can some drugs. So can a sublime event in nature. But the novel
operates on that high level. Sitting there, alone, quite still, you laugh, you
murmur, you cry, and you can come out of it with a new worldview, in a new
reality. It's a controlled breakdown, or breakthrough. It's dangerous...”
Howard Jacobson:
“...Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets and you will
find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an
attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find
hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve. Anyone would
think that the whole art and pleasure of reading consisted in getting
helter-skelter through a novel, unscathed, unchallenged, and without
encountering anyone but oneself. Once we wrestled with the angel when we read;
now we ask only to slumber in his arms.
But the greatest novels won't let us. The novelist, at his
swelling comic best – a Dickens or a Dostoevsky, a Cervantes or a Kafka, a
Joseph Roth or a Henry Miller – goes where Hamlet dares the skull of Yorick to
go, straight to my painted lady's chamber, rattling his bones and making her
laugh at the terrible fate that awaits her. His comedy spares nothing and
spares no one. And in the process asserts the stubbornness of life. Why would
we want to read anything less?...”
जी ए कुलकर्णी:
“...शेवटी मला एकच
गोष्ट कळृन चुकली
की, मी अगदी
पूर्ण, असाध्य वेडा आहे
पण इतर माणसे
कोणत्या बाबतीत शहाणी आहेत
हे मात्र मला
कधी उमगले नाही...”
'Don Quixote's death'
Artist: Gustave Dore (1832-1883)
