Meditations on Quixote Book

A pleasant read, short chapters, exhilarating ideas. The big concern here is the history and proper uses of the novel and what Quixote can teach us about it, being the occasion of the art form's birth.

To enjoy this book you only have to be familiar with the most famous episodes from Quixote, like the mistaking windmills for giants, discussed here:

"It is true that Don Quixote is out of his senses but the problem is not solved by declaring Don Quixote insane. What is abnormal in him has been and will continue to be normal in humanity. Granted that these giants are not giants, but what about the others? I mean, what about giants in general? Where did man get his giants? Because they never existed nor do they exist in reality...
"Justice and truth, too, like all expressions of the spirit, are mirages produced on matter. Culture-- the ideal side of things-- tries to set itself up as a separate and self-sufficient world to which we can transfer our hearts. This is an illusion, and only looked upon as an illusion, only considered as a mirage on earth, does culture take its proper place."

or the puppet show, discussed here:

"[The] collapse of the poetic is the theme of realistic poetry. I do not believe that reality can enter into art in any way other than by making an active and combative element out of its own inertia and desolation. It cannot interest us by itself... Therefore it does not actually matter what objects the realist chooses to describe. Any one at all will do, since they all have an imaginary halo around them, and the point is to show the pure materiality under it. We see in this materiality its final claim, its critical power before which, providing it is declared sufficient, man's pretension to the ideal, to all that he loves and imagines, yields; the insufficiency, in a word, of culture, of all that is noble, clear, lofty-- this is the significance of poetic realism. Cervantes recognizes that culture is all that, but that, alas, it is a fiction. Surrounding culture-- as the puppet-show of fancy was surrounded by the inn-- lies the barbarous, brutal, mute, meaningless reality of things."

A lot of my favorite books in recent years have been about culture, specifically literary culture-- all of Bolano's stuff, later Lethem, Humboldt's Gift, Vargas Llosa's shorter novels, the best of Percival Everett. One reason I like Ortega y Gasset's book is that he builds a case that these books taken together represent not just the "identity literature" of writers and MFA students, but that they actually hold true to the core project of the novel that Cervantes set out hundreds of years ago.