Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
I wrote a short review of Don Quixote that you can find here:
After alt lit & HTML Giant disappeared, I felt very depressed and betrayed and cynical about the literary world and humanity in general. I’d been working so hard for years to try and support young writers and boost and encourage people, and spread the reading. I felt like my years of work and time and attention had basically got flushed down the drain in a matter of weeks because of things that had nothing to do with me, and were out of my control.
I’ll never stop loving books, but I felt like maybe I should just go back to the hermit life of my bedroom library...fuck everybody if all they want to do is argue about petty shit, and pontificate about identity politics, and compete for crumbs of internet attention. Before alt lit, I had been more or less completely alone in my obsession with literature. I want to reach readers just like anyone, but I don’t need anybody’s validation or attention to make myself happy and create things that excite me. I've been a literature-head on my own for a very long time. I have a good idea of who I am and what I want out of life. I like having friends and a literary community. But I can also deeply relate to what Emily Dickinson said: "The Soul selects her own Society — / Then — shuts the Door —"
There are enough brilliant books in this world to last me 50 lifetimes.
At the same time, in my heart I’m a very idealistic person as well. I want to work for things that are bigger than my own wants. Living as a hermit seems like a very selfish and myopic way to go through this one life we have. I want to work for literature. I want to carry that torch to the next generation. I want to try (in whatever small way I can) to write something that will help and console and inspire and freak people out.
Don Quixote's relentlessly insane determination to become the world’s greatest errant knight is so contagious that rereading this book felt like getting saved again, to put it in religious terms. My cynicism didn't vanish, but my determination returned with a major force, as a counter-balance.
If you like Don Quixote, I suggest that you also check out a book of essays called ‘Our Lord Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Unamuno.’ (Although it might be out of print...you might have to buy a used copy or try and find it in a library.) The Unanmuno book compares Don Quixote to Jesus Christ and paints him as both a figure that is equally tragic and heroic.
This is a quote from the Unamuno book:
"But Don Quixote was converted. Yes — and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit — this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die."
Don Quixote is a very delusional, beautiful, inspiring hero to me. He never lost faith in his destiny to be a world famous knight, even though half of the time he’d end up getting beat up, laughed at, and run out of town.
Don Quixote makes me want to say fuck cynicism, especially justified cynicism. Fuck the reality of lowered expectations. Make your own reality. Wise men die the same as fools. The reality I want to make is a world where ordinary people still give a shit about what writers have to say, where they don't see writers as cliquey elitist assholes spewing academic jargon at an equally elitist audience. The reality I want is for everyone in the world to have a voice and be able to say whatever they want without some self-righteous PC patrolman telling you want you can and can't think.
Be insane, be wild, speak your heart, and do your best to change the world, especially if your attempt is hopeless to the point of ridicule. Get up on your old ass, broken down donkey, head toward the nearest city, and get to work.
Blake Butler - 300,000,000
For me, this book is a masterpiece, easily one of the best books to come out in the last 10 years. It made me shift my attention to thinking about writing in terms of a career. Part of what has stifled me in a lot of my writing is that I feel a strong drive to write a first book that hits that baseball way out of the fucking park. A book that no one has seen before. It’s vain to think about things in this way, but I only want to put out a books that are like flawless diamonds. There are already so many genius books the world that I feel a responsibility to only put out books that attain that level. I’m definitely no Joyce or Shakespeare, but I do feel a confidence deep down that if I work hard enough, I can put something into the world that will genuinely be worth a reader’s time.
I loved all of Blake Butler’s book that I’ve read so--especially Insomnia and Scorch Atlas--but I feel strongly that 300,000,000 is his best so far, a completely unique book that I feel only he could write. Instead of pinning all my literary aspirations to the book directly in front of me, I want to have a longer view, a view of a literary career that will hopefully last decades, until I’m sitting in a rocking chair smoking blunts from early morning to night, churning out sentences.
Many writers don’t write their best books until they’re three or four books in. It takes a long time and a lot of work to make something that could be called genuinely original, something that could only come from your own unique mind. That’s the goal that I want to achieve. I don’t really believe in creative competition--that idea doesn’t make much sense to me--but I definitely want to someday write a book that is of as good a quality as Blake Butler’s 300,000,000.
This is my understanding of the plot of the novel:
BOOK ONE: A mysterious man named Gretch Garvey amasses a following of drugged-out, nihilistic young men that start breaking into homes, indiscriminately murdering strangers. Flood, a detective, is put on the case to try and put an end to this burgeoning death cult. After Garvey gets arrested, Detective Flood starts interview his young followers, and tries to make sense of the seemingly insane ramblings in Garvey’s notebook, in which he implies the end of the world is at hand. It also seems that Garvey is possibly some type of supernatural prophet or demi-god, or at least that how his followers view him.
BOOK TWO:
Despite being arrested and put in jail, Gravey’s death cult continues to spread throughout America like a kind of virus. Ordinary people suddenly go insane, killing their family and neighbors and random strangers before killing themselves. Mass panic sets in as seemingly everyone in the United States begin to murder each other. There are long explicit descriptions of one murder after another. A death count starts to form, a death count that you know will eventually reach the novel’s title 300,000,000 aka every person in America.
BOOK THREE:
The police begin to investigate the house that Gravey and his boys have been living in. There is a mass grave underneath the house. It seems like Flood is starting to become infected with Gravey’s supernatural influence and plan to reduce all life in the US to one singular black hole of death. Flood falls head first into a hole in the basement, and seems to disappear from ordinary reality.
BOOK FOUR:
By this point in the book, it appears that almost everyone in America is dead. Mirrors have been a recurrent theme in the story since the beginning. Gravey’s house is covered in mirrors. Flood enters some kind of other universe in which he can pass through mirrors into the empty houses of people who have died. Flood is alone, perhaps the last living person in the country. He has no clear idea about what has happened, or what he is doing. He spends a lot of time travelling around the empty houses and cities, which are covered in dead bodies. I’ve heard in an interview that Blake Butler was thinking a lot of his dad, who passed away recently and suffered from dementia. Maybe what Flood is going through is what it would feel like to experience dementia -- complete confusions -- forgetting everything you know, even yourself -- to have no capacity to understand what is happening from moment to moment.
BOOK FIVE:
Although Gravey has been referring to an entity named Darrell since the begginging of the book, the novel now focuses on who or what Darrell is, who in a strange way seems to be everyone absorbed into a single being. It seems like Gravey is a prophet, and Darrell is the true force behind all the murders. Maybe Darrell is death itself. I think of this chapter as kind of being like the psychedelic end of Space Odyssey 2001 when the astronaut travels to the end of universe. Flood encounters several strange geometric shapes. This section deserves close attention and a lot of parsing apart and studying and thinking about, but even without that it was definitely an emotional experience for me that was not easily brushed off or forgotten.
I loved this last chapter a lot--I heard that Butler originally wasn’t going to add it to the end, but I’m very glad that he did. It gave me a perspective on Death that I hadn’t really thought about before. In some places, it’s implied that Darrell is every reflection in the mirror. It’s implied that everyone who dies become a part of Darrell, until eventually there is nothing that exists but Darrell. Darrell is everything and everyone condensed into one. Of course Death is scary and horrible and represents ultimate separation from each other and from "reality," but in another way Death is the origin and the end of everything. Inside Darrell, we are all one being again.
There are so many things that I’m leaving out this synopsis, but I wanted to write it down for my own sake, to articulate how I view the novel. Butler might disagree with my interpretation, I’m not sure, but after reading it twice, this is how I view the book in an overarching way.
I would like to read this book again, maybe in another year or two. It’s the type of book that I can see myself returning to over and over. Even if there was no recognizable plot at all, I feel that the language is bizarre and inventive enough to keep me coming back. Butler excels at sayings things that I’ve never heard before. His sentences and paragraphs almost never fail to put new ideas into my head.
From my point of view, if there’s any justice in the world (there isn’t, of course) this book will still be enthusiastically read 20, 30, 50 years from now. It’s an extremely violent and disturbing book, but it left a deep impression on me, and I’m sure that will continue to haunt me for a very long time.
