What I Read in 2009, Part 5: In Which I Never Read A Book Again Because College Is Over

Just kidding, I'm not enough of a functional human being to do that.

May

49. "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark"- Carl Sagan. I love Sagan and I respect what he's doing here, but it all feels, well, a little obvious. I mean yeah, yes, of course, many people would disagree, but I doubt they're reading Carl Sagan books.

50. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." -David Foster Wallace. A little less enthralling than "Consider the Lobster" but still a bench-mark for creative non-fiction. 

51. "Houses Are Fields"- Taije Silverman. My mentor wrote these poems, she's brilliant and these poems are all beautiful and situated at the exact mid-point between melancholy and universal infatuation that you need to appreciation when you're a week away from leaving your undergraduate career behind.

52. "Death in Venice"- Thomas Mann. I figured it was about time I read this, so I did. It was no Magic Mountain or Buddenbrooks, I'll say that much. Legitimately curious if this is the go-to for Mann just because its the shortest?

53. "Omega the Unknown"-Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan Lethem decided to do a super-hero comic. What's odd is that it is equal parts rip-off of Gerber's original Omega, and rehash of Fortress of Solitude, but it still held together and said something new. Weird arithmetic. 

54. "Heart of a Dog"- Mikhail Bulgakov. Not too pleased with this. Maybe "The Master and Margarita" set the Bulgakov bar too high for me. It all just seemed really heavy-handed.

55. "Monster"- Naoki Urasawa. In which I closed the blinds and locked the door and read a Japanese manga comic. Actually, it was really good in an "I'm Graham Greene and I need to put food on the table" kind of way. Tightly paced and plotted, solid characterization, very impressive cartooning. As far as thrillers go, I'd recommend it.

56. "Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini"-Alda Merini. As I understand it, she kind of fulfills the same poetic archetype in Italy as Plath does here, except she lived much longer. I liked this collection, but I'll admit a lot of that might actually be due to the translation, which is nice and crisp and minimal. The actual imagery and ideas felt a little blah to me on occasion. Saw her speak at... Princeton? Princeton or U Penn, I think. She died a few months later and I could tell that even moreso than usual, nobody cared about another dead writer. Never stops making me depressed when it happens. The last book I read at Ursinus, as a student. Sad.

57. "The Partly Cloudy Patriot"-Sarah Vowell. Sarah Vowell gets to join David Sedaris in the club of people I like on This American Life but do not like reading books by.

58. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" -Oliver Sacks. I read "An Anthropologist on Mars" a few years ago and was iffy about it, but I did like this. I feel like he does less talking down to his audience, and less patronizing lionizing of his subjects. Just a more honest-feeling book overall, I suppose.

59. "On the Pleasure of Hating"- William Hazlitt. Hazlitt is a great stylist, and some of his essays on boxing are really funny. Anyway, this was for the first blog post on here. Back when I updated it.

60. "2666"- Roberto Bolano. I read the first 300 or so pages of this slowly, in the midst of some other books, but blazed through the nightmarish middle section and sublime ending in three or four days including a camping trip in New Hampshire in which no given person was sober for more than maybe 15 seconds, which is not a pleasant state of mind for all those crimes, but is an effectively mimetic one, or something. My book of the year, I think, one that is still lodged in there just as unshakably as it was over half a year ago.

What I Read in 2009, Part 4: April is the gjdfhgdj Month

April

38. "Code of the Woosters"- P.G. Wodehouse. Just felt a strong urge to read a bunch of Wodehouse, so it was this and about half a book of short stories. I think an audiobook of the one where Jeeves gets rented out was involved too.

39. "The Awful End of Prince William the Silent"- Lisa Jardine. Jardine is one of my favorite history writers putting out non-scholarly books. However, I feel like this book could have stood to be a lot longer. As it was, you have a more or less perfunctory account of William of Orange and Catholic/Protestant intrigues, and a rather abbreviated look at gun culture in the 16th century. Good book, but I just wanted more of both. Also, led me to the startling discover that I own two other books about William the Silent. No idea.

40. "Snark"- David Denby. I guess the general consensus is that in 2009 David Denby wrote a shitty book that ruined everybody's spring. Listen-- its not a perfect book, and it gets really muddled and mealy-mouthed by the end, but I think it raised some good points and overall had a thesis I would find it hard to argue with. We can't ALL by Anthony Lane, ok?

41. "Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Mass Media Populism" -Umberto Eco. Eco is always engaging and I like it when he comes out of the library and talks about the modern world a bit. All the same, I often felt a little lost when reading this, just because so much of it is explicitly in-the-moment commentary on the Italian political situation in the early aughts. Whatever, though, the rest was terrific and I wound up having to look up many things about Italy's political climate and wound up less of an ignoramus.

42. "That Little Something"- Charles Simic. Simic in an unusually tender register. I think I read most of this in a hospital waiting room as well, and just finished off the last 20 pages or so in April.

43. "Sonata Mulattica"- Rita Dove. Really extraordinary book, for a lot of reasons. A sequence of narrative persona poems about 18th century Afro-Polish violin protege George Bridgetower, which feels so fresh and gave me such a hard "THIS IS WHERE POEMS SHOULD BE GOING" vibe. Sold me on Rita Dove after years of mixed feelings.

44. "Ingenious Pursuits: Inventing the Scientific Revolution"- Lisa Jardine. Another for Florka, and an incredibly compelling and accessible history of the greedy stumblings towards a method that took place way back when. I love Jardine.

45. "The Enchiridion"- Epictetus. Not impressed. I guess if I get stuck back in time in the 60's and have to go on a long hike I'll be able to keep up with the conversation, at least.

46. "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" -Victor Pelevin. Ugh. Low-point of senior sem, and possibly of entire English undergrad curriculum. Too many Final Fantasy 8 references for me to handle.

47. "Quantum Lyrics" -A. Van Jordan. Reread this after reading an interview with Jordan. Some impressive poems about Heisenberg and The Flash and a great sequence about Einstein's love life that I didn't give enough credit to the first time around.

48. "A Brief History of Nearly Everything"- Bill Bryson. The only Bryson book I've ever really, really enjoyed. Written with an overwhelming amount of charm and enthusiasm, and I certainly felt like less of an idiot when I was done with it.

What I Read in 2009, Part 3

I don't even remember what I did in March.

27. "Illness as Metaphor"- Susan Sontag. Read in a nice mid-70's hardcover with a dust-jacket upon which a hunch-backed and pudgy Hercules waves his arms around at a garden snake with two heads. I felt like her arguments vis a vis tuberculosis were much, much stronger than the cancer material.

28. "The Boy Detective Fails"- Joe Menos. Finally read after many, many recommendations. Maybe a little cutesy, stylistically, but you know, he had the good taste to keep a lot of the overly tweet formal experiments peripheral and really, when you think about it, entirely optional. Underneath all the hit or miss trickiness, there's a pretty solid and surprisingly tight story here.

29. "The Sun Also Rises"- Ernest Hemingway. Reread to settle a point that had been nagging at me for awhile, ever since I heard that at least two people I know consider this as a kind of... rival piece, I guess you'd say, to Gatsby. Not convinced after the reread but definitely glad I took the time to revisit such a perfect book.

30. "Exercises in Style"- Raymond Queneau. Babby's first Queneau. Yeah, I know.

31. "The Werewolf of Paris"- Guy Endore. Another for senior seminar, and an interesting choice because on many levels its an extremely blatant dime pulp, full of what must have passed for gratuitous sex and violence in 1932. Still, it grew on me not only as a fascinating historical artifact but also as a considerably better novel than I gave it credit for. Don't go in expecting Stendhal with fur and fangs or anything, but as an ur-text of a major contemporary monster trope its at least way better than anything Bram Stoker ever pooped out.

32. "Gravity's Rainbow"- Thomas Pynchon. I'd owned this book for at least six years, and every so often would pick it up, read about 60 pages, and set it back down in confusion and fear. You know what? The trick is to just roll with it. Pynchon knows what he's doing. Get into his scary stranger van and just let him do the driving.

33. "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion"- Steven C. Weisenburger. Probably the best of this kind of thing I've read, probably a worthwhile read even if you haven't and never plan to read GR, honestly. Lots of fascinating little things to be found.

34. "The Posthuman Dada Guide" -Andrei Codrescu. Bafflingly organized, and a little too infatuated with its own cleverness, but Codrescu writes here with an irresistible rhetorical heteroglossia. What's his point here? Who knows, he makes like 15 contradictory ones every three pages, but he makes them with such lunatic glee that you have to just drink it all in and think it all over and sort it out for yourself.

35. "Invisible Cities"- Italo Calvino. In late March my father was rushed to the emergency room, with pessimistic expectations. It was a really terrible couple of days, and when I got in the car to get to the hospital I just grabbed the nearest thing at hand for the whole waiting room experience. Thankfully, I wound up with a book I didn't appreciate enough the first time through. Of course, it would be stupid to suggest that you need to read this in a crisis to get more than a cool aesthetic appreciation, but maybe it helps. 

36. "Orlando"- Virginia Woolf. The fact that this novel is so stylistically dissimilar to the classic Woolf routine just adds another layer to the wonderful and startlingly lucid strangeness of the whole thing. Another for senior seminar.

37. "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture"- Juliet B. Schor. I'm not sure why this was in my car, but it was the only thing to read in a freezing airport waiting for my girlfriend's delayed flight to land. Interesting and hackle-raising investigation of marketing practices.

What I Read in 2009, Part 2: My Studious Valentine

Sorry for that title, ugh. Anyway.

February

15. "On the Shortness of Life"- Seneca. Jesus, I had such an unbearable little stoic phase after this. Sorry to everyone who had to deal with it, probably. Anyway, lent this to an ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough spot and never got it back, after saying I'd lend it to another ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough spot and forgetting too. I guess what I learned from Seneca is that I'm a pretty wretched person. This was the darling little Penguin Great Ideas version, incidentally, which came in a small red box and was the object of much aesthetic attention around the apartment for a few days. 

16. "Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together"-Bryan Lee O'Malley. Much more sombre than the rest of O'Malley's stuff. Surprisingly so. 

17. "Netherland"- Joseph O'Neill. Not as into this as much of the book blogosphere was, but still deeply moved and impressed. This was kind of my turning point, sadly, for realizing that barely anyone at Ursinus read the school paper and even fewer read the book column. Kind of disheartening but after that realization I started cursing in it more. The small victories.

18. "How Fiction Works." -James Wood. For better or worse, I really like James Wood. That being said, I found at least two or three things I vehemently disagreed with on pretty much every page of this thing. Still, what's important is that I disagreed with gusto and a big excited grin. Wood is firm in his points in the kind of way that invites rebuttal, so I had a great time finding fault with this little firecracker (lame last sentence).

19. "She's Not There" -Jennifer Finney Boylan. In late January I was invited by the head of Ursinus' creative writing department to a dinner with Jennifer Finney Boylan in between a small Q&A and a school reading. This was exciting, except I hadn't read any of hers at any point ever. When this book came in the mail I tore through it in an evening sitting on the outside stairs of my apartment, with my fingers numb by around page 150 from the cold. Even as I write this I feel like it's a contradiction to say something is both "page-turning" and deeply thoughtful, but here I am writing it. I have my bones of contention with modern memoir, but this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand anything about the medium of memoir, or about storytelling in general, or god dammit even about being a good human being.

20. "Three Men in a Boat"- Jerome K. Jerome. Had always heard this touted as one of the funniest novels of all time, honestly I suppose I must be missing something because it was a huge letdown. Funniest bit came at the beginning with the hypochondriac catalogue, but otherwise it was everything dated about early 20th century British humor that Wodehouse and Waugh managed to transcend (or apotheosize, I don't know) with some truly embarrassing lapses into Housman-style dapply pastoral saccharine.

21. "The Gold Cell"- Sharon Olds. Sharon Olds is a marvel.

22. "A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes" -Witold Gombrowicz. I love Gombrowicz, and I'd like to think I know enough about philosophy to say I like it, but I'm still a little puzzled about the point of this. Its so fragmentary that occasionally it feels like another post-humous cash-in (spoiler: didn't read "The Original of Laura") but here and there everything great about Gombrowicz will burst out in a perfect fragment or snatch of words. 

23. "Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe"-Bryan Lee O'Malley. You know what, everything I wrote about O'Malley above might actually apply to this one instead. Honestly I don't know, and I totally forgot that I read two of these things last year.

24. "The Book of Dead Philosophers"- Simon Critchley. Amazing book, part primer, part meditation, part satire, part history, part guhguhreh just so good. Plus, almost certainly the best conclusion of any book actually written in 2009.

25. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"- Robert Louise Stevenson. Another one for senior seminar. I guess this was one of those stories so ingrained in the popular imagination that I didn't realize I'd never read it until I actually got around to reading it. 

26. "Kepler"- John Banville. Read for the redoubtable Dr. Roger Florka's course on early Scientific Methodology (I guess? I forget the actual name of the course). Banville's novels in contemporary settings never really grabbed me, but Kepler really resonated in some way. Banville brings his usual muted poetry to the book, but creates a much more complex protagonist than I'd expected based on his other stuff. 

What I Read in 2009, Part 1: January, Robert Lowell's Electric Chair

2009 was a long year, it was a bad year, the weather repeatedly cracked its knuckles and got down to business, and people all over the world gave more of a shit about the Shamwow guy dying than about W.D. Snodgrass. Fortunately I had so many books I could just sit in my home and curl up in a compact fetal crescent and read them instead of engaging with our awful end-times.

Here they are, what they were and how they were.

January

1. "The Devil in the White City"- Erik Larsen. I read this book at my girlfriend's house in Vermont. She doesn't have a shower there, rather one of those grotesque majesties of a bathtub with the griffon feet and everything. Anyway, I read a great deal of this book sitting in that thing getting so pruny I probably looked like I'd attended the 1893 World's Fair.

 On New Year's Eve I was all up in everyone's faces about this book, going on and on about the national debut of PBR, and the ferris wheel, and the serial killer, and Colonel Zufelt, and so much more, and finished it as my flight descended on Philadelphia. What an incredible book. Pop history can be shallow and superficial, but at its best it can speak to such a panorama of experience, submerged and flourescent alike. God I wish I'd been at that 1893 World's Fair.

2. "I Am Going To Be Small"- Jeffrey Brown. Jeffrey Brown, if you don't know, is a kind of auteur of small-press autobiographical comics. Lots of candid little novels about his miserable sex life and such. This was a collection of some of his lighter, goofier stuff, which was a nice change of pace from his usual thing but also not that remarkable. Sorry J. Brown.

3. "The Moviegoer"- Walker Percy. Walker Percy can put together some fucking phenomenal sentences, if you can accommodate his pace. His best novel, as far as I'm concerned, but not a lot of moviegoing as such gets done. Too bad "The Searchers" is taken.

4. "Underwater"- Chester Brown. Luminous GN about early childhood, and guilt, and beauty. I have a hard time actually recommending it though, because it is unfinished. Brown lost interest, I guess, about 200 pages in, so it exists in this weird kind of limbo where you can tell its a masterpiece but can't quite muster up the nerve to call it one.

5. "Nabokov's Dozen"- Vladimir Nabokov. Why on earth would anybody read this instead of one of the more comprehensive collections of his short stories? Because it was cheap, I guess, and had nice yellowed pages and that 60's paperback smell. A nice collection but I wish I'd sprung for the whole set of stories. 

6. "The Principles of Uncertainty"- Maira Kalman. A collection of Maira Kalman's wry and gorgeous water-color diary journalism blog whatevers that she did for the New York Times awhile ago. 

7. "Hermit in Paris"- Italo Calvino. Basically a big catch-all of Calvino's autobiographical writings. Pretty uneven, if only because a large portion of the book is devoted to journalistic interviews, which tend to cover a lot of the same ground. Can't fault the guy for consistency, but the editors could have pruned a little bit to prevent having to hear the same parental background six times. The history of Mussolini portraiture is brilliant, though.

8. "The Prestige"- Christopher Priest. Round one of my intermittent attempts to get into science fiction in 2009. Entertaining enough, good twists and all that, but not as trim and elegant as the movie. And points off for not including Bowie.

9. "Love is a Mix Tape"- Rob Sheffield. Agonized over picking this up for so long, because I kept hearing good things but it looked so, so corny. I suppose I'm glad I read it, the style's comparable to a more vulnerable and wide-eyed Chuck Klosterman I guess, with a lot less acidity and a lot more (maybe warranted) sentimentality. Not great, but a quick read with some good humor and some touching moments.

10. "Native Guard"- Natasha Trethewey. Boy oh boy, a Pulitzer prize winner. As a writer I tend to have a little distaste for overtly confessional poetry, and a tentative fear of form, so when I read a collection that engages with either I do so with some reserves and some muted awe, respectively. As a collection that gets its hands deep into the viscera of both of those things, Native Guard is an intimidating beast. I remember being very impressed, more so with the integration of form into personal narrative than by that narrative itself. 

11. "110 Per$"- Tony Consiglio. Kind of an Alex Robinson type thing, a bit reminiscent of "Tricked" really, with some subtle nods to it. Sort of slight, but with some surprisingly nuanced characterization here and there. 

12. "Let It Be"- Colin Meloy. In general, those 33 1/3 books have been kind of a disappointment. I was sick in the middle of January, and was lent this book by my girlfriend, a big Decemberists/Colin Meloy fan. I like The Replacements enough, I guess, so I gave it a shot. 

Well-- it was better than some of the books in this little line I've read, especially the ones that just read like Brent Dicrescenzio trying for a pay-bump, and I do appreciate the titles that lean more towards memoir than straight history, but it still felt pretty self indulgent. Which is a shame, because the story of the album is a pretty interesting one, definitely more interesting than what Colin Meloy did when he was seven.

13. "The Golden Ass"- Apuleius. Probably better at capturing the feeling of Fellini's "Satyricon" than the actual "Satyricon." A totally fascinating late-Roman novel of low comedy and high mysticism, required reading for anybody who wants to know a thing about anything.

14. "Saga of the Volsungs." An important Icelandic Saga, good to have read if you're interested in the whole narrative genealogy or whatever of Wagner's Nibelungen (although possibly the Nibelungenleid would be the MORE crucial source, I guess, who knows). Interesting but honestly the almost total alienness of the value system makes it tough to fathom, let alone enjoy per se. In the interest of full disclosure (har) I should say that this book and the last one were read for my senior seminar. 

And that caps off January.

Some Fun With Goethe

"What is this bullshit??"

In the spirit of Monday's thing at U Penn (for those who were there), a little something regarding translation.

So, today I was reading Robert Hass' book "Time and Materials" and came across this piece:

"After Goethe"

In all the mountains,
Stillness;
In the treetops
Not a breath of wind.
The birds are silent in the woods.
Just wait: soon enough
You will be quiet too.

-tr. Robert Hass

I had to smile because I recognized this as a pretty faithful translation of a short Goethe poem I'd taken a stab at translating myself about a year ago. After some searching I found the notebook I'd written it down in and was pleased to find that my two attempts were fairly close to Hass', although perhaps leaning a bit more towards literal accuracy or poetic license in either direction.

The more literal first gloss:

"Wanderer's Night Song"

Over all summits
is peace,
in every treetop
you sense
scarcely a breath.
The little birds are silent in the forest.
But wait, soon
you too will rest.

Second try:

"Traveler's Night Song"

All summits stand
in silence,
the sense of stillness
in every breathless treetop.
The little birds are silent in the forest.
Wait a moment- soon
you too will be at rest.

And here's the original:

"Wandrer's Nachtlied"

Uber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

As you can see there's a lovely ABAB CDDC rhyme scheme in the original that is lost. Also notice the phrase "Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch." Spuren denotes a kind of active sensory awareness that isn't quite "feels" and isn't quite "senses" and isn't quite "intuits." It's a great word that loses something in the act of translation.

So there's my little foray into some of the issues we heard about earlier this week. I guess my point is that even at a largely amateur level, or in a rather casual attempt at even a poem as short and sweet as this one, you find yourself grappling with pretty sticky issues of meaning and form. 

Are any of the translations "good"? Well, that depends. As far as I'm concerned, all three give a fairly close account of the surface meaning of Goethe's original poem. None of them claim, for example, that "silence lay all around the townhall" or that the little squirrels of the wood were all silent. Do they exist as "good" poems, then? Insofar as all three hue closely to Goethe's fairly simple and stark language, it isn't a stretch to say that each also retains some of the power of his imagery. While obviously of the three Hass' is the most accomplished stylistically, each manages to escape the long traverse of language with some imagistic integrity intact. 

As much as any poem can derive weight and virtue from what it's "about" then it must be fair to say that each of these translations is roughly (very roughly) as good as Goethe's. But that, of course, is absurd, if you just end it there. Poetry exists as sound as well as text (well, yeah) and in that sense all three translations are clumsy, piecemeal attempts to catch up to something organic and liberated. Even if you don't know any German, try reading Goethe's original out loud. The cadence flows and halts, starts at a sharp sound and resumes motion with trepidation-- it capitulates the movement of a traveler moving through an unsettlingly silent wilderness at night even without the benefit of the reader knowing what each word means. 

I can't speak for prose-- we've all heard, I guess, how much Dostoyevsky for example benefits from translation-- but in poetry, a translation can be effective, it can be smart, it can even be beautiful, but it is ultimately and necessarily a losing game. 

Kicking Against the Tricks: Reading Cervantes' Duchess and the Duke

I guess it's one of those little commonplace "fun facts" about literature that Nabokov wasn't a big fan of Don Quixote. His lectures on the book are uncharacteristically nit-picky and pedantic, with a kind of catty undertone that usually only comes out in personal interviews. However, there's one point that he strikes on that other critics tend to skirt around, or dress up in equivocations:

"Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia or cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic."

Maybe this goes a little ways in illuminating Nabokov's distaste, for who, in the 20th century, comes so close to matching Cervantes' theatrical cruelty? I think its fair to say that Nabokov approached fiction like a grandmaster; all of his novels set up the pieces and maneuver them into position for a killing stroke. His cruelty is controlled and, sometimes, cold. 

Don Quixote on the other hand maintains a definite warmth for the big D and Sancho despite putting them through the wringer. The narrative voice throughout is curious; its easy at the start to read its praise of the characters as ironic, but as the novel progresses, particularly in the second part, its hard not to feel that the sardonic irony of the narrator is splitting, with the world becoming crueller and the characters becoming less ridiculous and more sublime. And, remarkably, the reader shifts from being complicit in the universe's tricks against Quixote to being almost another dupe at points. 

The key incident here is the episode of Sancho Panza's governorship. How can you not feel a little elated, about halfway through Part Two, when the duke finally bestows an insula on the long-suffering squire? All these fantasies and deceptions and everybody getting the shit knocked out of them and now, man, at last he gets what he wants. 

Except, of course he doesn't. Everything that's been promised in the novel so far has been false; everything the duke and the duchess, in particular, have shown has been an elaborate prank on the novel's two heros. Why should this be any different? Soon we're even told that the population of the village is in on the scheme, that everything has been set up in advance. Still, incredibly, the reader insists on a bit of optimism that Cervantes obligingly stokes. This entire sequence of events, when the certainty that Sancho's reward isn't genuine struggles against the hope that it is, constitutes for me some of the most heartbreaking tension in the history of the novel. 

"We need to hold in mind as we read Don Quixote that we cannot condescend to the Knight and Sancho, since together they know more than we do," writes Harold Bloom. The funny thing is, for 900-odd pages the narrator does just that-- the entire novel is the process of coming to rebel against the narrator, and by extension the audience of the first part of the novel who make up most of the second part's cast. Because at the root of it, the duke and the duchess are the reader, or at least the image of what the reader once was, a few hundred pages ago-- they read Don Quixote as a funny adventure story, and they view Quixote himself as inherently ridiculous. And let's be fair, for almost 500 pages he is, before Cervantes pulls the rug out from under himself.

When the reader crosses that strange border of empathy and comes to hold the duchess and the duke in contempt, what he's really doing is looking a few hundred pages back at himself. This is Cervantes' miracle, his benediction where Nabokov would be springing his trap. Don Quixote is a novel that teaches us how to read it in showing us ourselves as readers. Laughing, we're all the fucking awful duchess and duke; fooled by affection into hoping for a happy resolution, we're all Quixote.