Making Fun of Mental Illness since 1605

Jan-Apr 2021
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes, tr. John Rutherford – Penguin Classics, 2003
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Maybe I am becoming old and cynical, or maybe it's the depressing effects of lockdown, but this is the second "great" novel I have read in the past year that didn't really work for me. I can see why authors and literary academics are enthusiastic - it's a playful and inventive work with some astonishingly modern conceits, including several (possibly unreliable) narrators, a hero who isn't very heroic and is in fact rather dislikeable, and a second half in which many of the characters are aware of and have read the first half - but what I was most reminded of was the shallow characterisation and casual cruelty evident in Shakespeare's less good comedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice, or in pretty much everything that Christopher Marlowe ever wrote. Now of course it's not fair to criticise a work written over four centuries ago for failing to live up to modern expectations of character development or emotional subtlety, but Don Quixote has been voted by authors as the most meaningful book of all time, and I simply don't see it.
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