Category Archives: books to read

EL Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Qvixote de La Mancha (primera parte) I

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote De La Mancha: Edición Conmemorativa IV Centenario Cervantes. Madrid: Real Academia Españƒola, 2015. Print. (First ed. 1605)

Siglo de Oro

“Salieron para America cientos de ejemplares de la novela… Lo que no había conseguido Cervantes, lo lograba su criatura asentándose en el Nuevo Mundo.” (México -> Cartagena de Indias -> Portobelo, Panamá -> El Callao) p. xi

To Watch Дон Кихот Don Quixote (1957) Grigori Kozintsev.

 

José Ortega y Gasset Meditaciones del Quijote “su eje central es precisamente el diálogo,” p. xxi  See “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia”

“complejidad del sistema novelístico de Cervantes y sus estrategias para casar versímilmente su fábula mentirosa con la inteligencia de sus lectores están poderosamente condicionadas por la encrucijada en la que, como también Shakespeare y todos sus contemporáneos, se encuentra: la del solapamineto de la la galaxia Gutenberg con la pervivencia, muy vívida todavía, de formas de coexistencia y comunicaión arcaicas en las que sigue muy arraigada la oralidad.” p. p xxii

Quijote “Llegado, por el contrario, a Barcelona, ve en una imprenta cómo se corrigen las pruebas de una nueva edición de Quijote de Avellaneda, y ello le da pie para denostarlo.” p. xxiv

Olfato y tacto en Don Quijote p.  xxvii

Primera edición conocida de Amadís de Gaula de Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, impresa en Zaragoza por Jorge Coci, 1508. Via Wikimedia.

Amadís de Gaula

Portada de Los cinco libros del esforzado e invencible caballero Tirante el Blanco, primera traducción al castellano de Tirant lo Blanc, impresa por Diego de Gumiel. Via Wikimedia.

Tirante el Blanco

Tristán de Leonís

“Al final, termina por salirse con la suya. La ficción va contaminando lo vivido y la realidad se va gradualmente plegando a las excentricidades y fantasías de don Quijote. p. XXXV (Mario Vargas Llosa, Una novela para el siglo XXI)

“Los amigos del pueblo de don Quijote, tan adversos a las novelerías literarias que hacen una quema inquisitorial de su biblioteca, con el pretexto de curar a Alonso Quijano de su locura recurren a la ficción: urden y protagonizan representaciones para devolver al Caballero de la Triste Figura a la cordura y al mundo real. Pero, en verdad, consiguen lo contrario: que la ficción comience a devorar la realidad.” p. XXXVI (Mario Vargas Llosa, Una novela para el siglo XXI)

Ruta de Don Quijote

“El Quijote no cree que la justicia, el orden social, el progreso, sean funciones de la autoridad, sino obra del quehacer de individuos que, como sus modelos, los caballeros andantes, y él mismo, se hayan echado sobre los hombros la tarea que hacer menos injusto y más libre  próspero el mundo en el que viven.” p. XL (Mario Vargas Llosa, Una novela para el siglo XXI)

“la Santa Hermandad, cuerpo de justicia en el mundo rural, de la que se tiene anuncios durante las correrías de don Quijote y Sancho, son mencionadas más bien como algo lejano, oscuro y peligroso.” p. XL

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“España aparace como un espacio muchi más vasto, cohesionado en su diversidad geográfica y cultural y de unas inciertas fronteras que parecen definirse en función no de territorios y demarcaciones administrativas, sino religiosas: España termina en aquellos límites vagos, y concretamente marinos, donde comienzan los dominios del moro, el enemigo religioso.” p. XLII

“como ocurre con las obras maestras paradigmáticas… al igual que el Hamlet, o La divina comedia, o la Ilíada y la Odisea, ella evoluciona con el paso del tiempo y se recrea a sí misma en función de las estéticas y los valores que cada cultura privilegia, revelendo que es una verdadera caverna de Alí Babá, cuyos tesoros nunca se extienguen.” p. XLIII-XVLIV

To Read

Rayuela by Cortazar,

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

“Aprovechando lo que era un tópico de la novela de caballerías (muchas de ellas eran supuestos manuscritos encontrados en sitios exóticos y estrafalarios), Cervantes hizo de Cide Hamete Benengeli un dispositivo que introducía la ambigüedad y el juego como rasgos centrales de la estructura narrativa.” p. XLIV

Canto de Calíope en La Galatea

Title page of La Galatea. Via Wikimedia.

“Cervantes, que se vio imposibilitado de hacer efectivas las sumas recogidas, fue internado en la cárcel de Sevilla, donde pasó unos tres meses del año 1597.” p. LXX (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“En 1613 aparecen las Novelas ejemplares; en 1614 el Viaje del Parnaso; en 1615 la Segunda parte del Quijote y las COmedia y entremeses; y en 1617, póstumamente, el Persiles y Sigismunda. O sea que la gran época de aparición de las obras de Cervantes, presciendiendo de la Primera parte del Quijote, corresponder a la etapa que va de los 66 a los 68 años del escritor.” p. LXXI (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Aunque Cervantes ha escrito estos versos en tono humurístico, no deja de haber en ellos cierta amargura de quien, sabiéndose un gran prosista, comprende que no puede compararse con los grandes poetas de su tiempo.” p. LXXIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Fue enterrado en el convento de las Trinitarias Descalzas de la calle de Cantarranas (hoy Lope de Vega), donde sin duda esposan todavía sys restos sin que haya posibilidad de identificarlos.” p. LXXVIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“En el Quijote Cervantes recoge la experiencia de los recuerdos de su vida; en el Persiles recoge el fruto de sis lecturas de libros.” p. LXXIX (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“El “caballero andante” existió, y todavía erraba por los caminos de Europa y de corte en corte en demanda de aventuras (justas, pasos de armas, torneos, batallas a todo trance) un siglo antes de que Cervantes se pusiera a escribir el Quijote. Y alrededor de estos caballeros existió una literatura que puede distribuirse en dos categorías: la biografía del caballero y la novela caballeresca. Como ejemplos de la primera categoría tenemos el Livre des faits du bon messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, el Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing y el Victorial, o biografía de don Pero Niño, y podriamos añadir el Libro del Passo Honroso… A la segunda categoría pertenecen determinadas novelas … Las catalanas Curial e Güelfa y Tirant lo Blanch y las francesas Jean de Saintré y el Roman de Jean de Paris… Basta señalar que la biografía de un caballero perfectamente histórico como fue Jacques de Lalaing, que realizó sus primeras hazañas en Vallodolid, ofrece gran similitud con la novela que tiene por protagonista al ficticio Jean de Saintré.. Este tipo de novelas a las que conviene dar el nombre de “novelas caballescas” en clara oposición a los “libros de caballerías”, fue comprendido por Cervantes, como atestigua su elogio del Tirant lo Blanch” p. LXXXIV (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“El Quijote no es, como creyeron algunos románticos, una burla del heroísmo y del idealismo noble, sino la burla de unos libros que, por sus extremosas exageraciones y su falta de mesura, ridiculizaban lo heroico y lo ideal.” p. LXXXV (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Da la impresión que Certantes escribía sin leer su labor.” p. LXXXVIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“Cervantes, cuando escribe la Segunda parte de la novela, tiene ya sesenta y ocho años, está en la miseria, ha padecido desdichas de toda suerte en la guerra y en el cautiverio, el honor de su hogar no ha sido siempre limpio ni ejemplar, ha recibido humillaciones y burlas en el cruel ambiente literario; y a pesar de todo ello, por encima de sus angustias, de sus estrecheces y de sus penas, el buen humor y el agudo donaire inundan las páginas del Quijote. p. XCIII (Martín de Riquer, Cervantes y el “Quijote”)

“la más desdichada de tales transposiciones fue que la supresión de unas páginas en que se narraba cómo Sancho Panza perdió a si jumento no llevó aneja la eliminación de la referencias al escudero montado en el asno” p. CII (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“endecasílabo) El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha.” p. CIV (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“Téngase en cuenta que los libros se ponían entonces a la venta “en papel”, es decir, como un conjunto de pliegos sin encuadernar, y así serían los Quijotes que Cervantes tuviera a mano a principios de 1605.” p. CXI (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“Tras un corto período de gran éxito, la novela sufre un eclipse desde 167 hasta que la devuelve al mercado la edición de Madrid, 1636-1637, cuatro o conco veces reimpresa en la Corte en los decenios siguientes,” p. CXII (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

“vacilaciones presentes en los escritos de puño y letra de Cervantes.” mesmo~mismo, cuasi~casi, fee~fe, escrebir~escribir invidia~envidia, sospiro~suspiro, asconder~esconder, húmido~húmedo, imágines~imágenes, proprio~propio, recebir~recibir, esaminador~examinador, eceto~exepto, agora~ahora, ansí~así, güésped~huésped, deste~de este, della~de ella.  CXV-CXVI (Francisco Rico, Nota al texto)

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Nobel Laureates 1980-1984

Jaroslav Seifert 1984

Czechoslovakia/Austria-Hungary (poetry)

Deštník z Picadilly

William Golding 1983

UK (novel/poetry/drama)

Lord of the FliesThe InheritorsFree Fall

Gabriel García Márquez 1982

Colombia (novel/short story)

Cien años de soledadCrónica de una muerte anunciadaEl coronel no tiene quien le escriba

Elias Canetti 1981

UK/Bulgaria (drama/novel/essay)

Crowds and Power, Auto-da-Fé

Czesław Miłosz 1980

Poland (poetry/essay)

Wiersze ostatnieKról Popiel i inne wierszeHymn o Perle

Nobel Laureates 1989-1985

Camilo José Cela 1989

Spain (novel/short story) (see Generacion del 36 and tremendismo)

The Family of Pascual Duarte (La familia de Pascual Duarte), La colmenaSan Camilo, 1936 

نجيب محفوظ‎‎  Naguib Mahfouz 1988

Egypt (novel/short story/screenplay)

ثلاثية القاهرة The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk بين القصرين, Palace of Desire قصر الشوق, Sugar Street السكرية [Novels named after actual streets in Cairo,])

Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский Joseph Brodsky 1987

US/Soviet Union (poetry/essay)

Less Than One: Selected EssaysCollected Poems in English, 1972–1999, To Urania : Selected Poems, 1965–1985

Akinwándé Oluwolé Babátúndé Sóyinká Wole Soyinka 1986

Nigeria (drama/novel/poetry)

Season of AnomyThe InterpretersDeath and the King’s Horseman

Claude Simon 1985

France/Madagascar (novel)

La Route des FlandresHistoireL’Acacia

Nobel Laureates 1999-1995

Günter Grass 1999

Germany (novel, drama, graphic design) Nazi Germany

Work:  The Tin Drum, Cat and MouseDog Years (Danzig Trilogy

José Saramago 1998

Portugal (novel)

Work:  Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda), O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ), Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness), História do Cerco de Lisboa (The History of the Siege of Lisbon)   

Dario Fo 1997

Italy (drama)

Work: Guerra di popolo in Cile, Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, Il Papa e la strega (The Pope and the Witch)

Wisława Szymborska 1996

Poland (poetry)

Work: Love At First Sight poem (Watch Three Colors: Red), Here, View With a Grain of Salt: Selected Poems

Seamus Heaney 1995

UK/Ireland (poetry)

Work: Beowulf 1999 translationDeath of a NaturalistThe Spirit Level

NOBEL LAUREATES 2004-2000

Elfriede Jelinek 2004

Germany (drama/novel)

Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher), Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead)Greed, Lust

J. M. Coetzee 2003

South Africa (novel/essay)

Work: Boyhood, Life & Times of Michael KWaiting for the Barbarians 

Imre Kertész 2002

Hungary (novel)

Work: FatelessnessKaddish for an Unborn Child

Sir V. S. Naipaul 2001

Trinidad and Tobago/UK (novel)

Work: The Loss of El DoradoThe Enigma of ArrivalGuerrillas  

高行健 Gao Xingjian 2000

China/France (novel/screenwriter)

Work: 給我老爺買魚竿 Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 靈山 Soul Mountain一個人的聖經 One Man’s Bible

The Sound and The Fury

 Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print. (1984 correction, first ed. 1929)

Luster “If you don’t hush, you know what I going to do. I going to eat that cake all up. Eat them candles, too. Eat all them thirty three candles. Come on, les go down to the branch. I got to find my quarter.” p. 4

“”Where’d you get a quarter, boy. Find it in white folks’ pocket while they aint looking.”
“Got it at the getting place.” Luster said. “Plenty more where that one come from. Only I got to find that one. Is you all found it yet.”
“I aint studying no quarter. I got my own business to tend to.”” p. 14

“The bones rounded out of the ditch, where the dark vines were in the black ditch, into the moonlight, like some of the shapes had stopped.” p. 33-34

“Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.” p. 41

Et ego in arcadia (Et in arcadia ego)p. 44

“And one evening, when they was about a dozen them bluegum chillen running around the place, he never come home. Possum hunters found him in the woods, et clean. And you know who et him. Them bluegum chillen did.” p. 69

“You’ve been running a long time, not to’ve got any further off than mealtime, Jason said.” p. 71

“Then he went to the window and looked out. He came back and took my arm. Here she come, he said. Be quiet, now. We went to the window and looked out. It came out of Quentin’s window and climbed across into the tree. We watched the tree shaking. The shaking went down the tree, then it came out and we watch it go away across the grass. Then we couldn’t see it.” p. 74

“I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” p. 76

“I passed the jeweler’s window, but I looked away in time. At the corner two bootblacks caught me, one on either side, shrill and raucous, like blackbirds. I gave the cigar to one of them, and the other one a nickel. Then they let me alone. The one with the cigar was trying to sell it to the other for the nickel.” p. 83

“He was going bald. There was a glass in his eye–a metal tube screwed into his face. I went in.
The place was full of ticking, like crickets in September grass, and I could hear a big clock on the wall above his head. He looked up, his eye big and blurred and rushing beyong the glass.” p. 83

“There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictiory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradiction one another.” p. 85

“And all that day, while the train wound through rushing gaps and along ledges where movement was only a laboring sound of the exhaust and groaning wheels and the eternal mountains stood fading into the thick sky,” p. 88

“The ship went through the bridge, moving under bare poles like a ghost in broad day, with three gulls hovering above the stern like toys on invisible wires.” p. 89-90

***”It twinkled and glinted, like breathing, the float slow like a breathing too, and debris half submerged, healing out to the sea and the caverns and the grottoes of the sea.” p. 90

“You can feel noon. I wonder if even miners in the bowels of the earth.” p. 104

“Father said that a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said.” p. 104

“I could still see the smoke stack. That’s where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes.” p. 112

“Only our country was not like this country. There was something about just walking through it. A kind of still and violent fecundity that satisfied even bread-hunger like. Flowing around you, not brooding and nursing every niggard stone.” p. 113

“The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept. Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow, whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky.” p. 115

“The arrow increased without motion, then in a quick swirl the trout lipped a fly beneath the surface with that sort of gigantic delicacy of an elephant picking up a peanut.” p. 116-117

***”Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.” p. 117

“He leaned on the rail, looking down at the trout which he had already spent, and suddenly the acrimony, the conflict, was gone from their voices, as if to them too it was as though he had captured the fish and bought his horse and wagon, they too partaking of that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority.” p. 118

“The street turned again. I could see the white cupola, the round stupid assertion of the clock.” p. 124

“took up the coins and found two coppers in her apron and gave them to me. I handed them to the little girl. Her fingers closed about them, damp and hot, like worms.” p. 126-127

“She looked at me. She chewed quietly and steadily; at regular intervals a small distension passed smoothly down her throat. I opened my package and gave her one of the buns. “Good bye,” I said. p. 129

“Them furriners. I cant tell one from another. You might take her across the tracks where they live, and maybe somebody’ll claim her.” p. 130

“I don’t know
outside the gray light the shadows of things like dead
things in stagnant water” p. 157

“I went to the diningroom. Quentin was sitting with her head bent. She had painted her face again. Her nose looked like a porcelain insulator.” p. 257

“She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.” p. 265-266

“saw the old woman in her quilted dressing gown at the head of the stairs, calling her name with machinelike regularity.” p. 270

“It was not the bottle which Mrs Compson wanted, however, and clutching it by the neck like a dead hen Dilsey went to the foot of the stairs and looked upward.” p. 270

“She made no further move, but though she could not see her save as a blobby shape without depth, Mrs Compson knew that she had lowered her face a little and that she stood now like cows do in the rain, holding the empty water bottle by its neck.” p. 272

“The window was open. A pear tree grew there, close against the house. It was in bloom and the branches scraped and rasped against the house and the myriad air, driving in the window, brought into the room the forlon scent of the blossoms.” p.

“The Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.” p. 288

“Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time.” p. 295

“But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.” p. 316

To read Absalom, Absalom! (1936), A Fable (1954), As I lay Dying (1930)

To re-read The Sound and the Fury.

Read the poem Kubla Khan (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

To read poem The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot

Nobel Laureates 2009-2005

Herta Müller 2009

Germany/Romania (novel/poetry) communism under Nicolae Ceaușescu

Work: NadirsThe Land of Green PlumsThe Passport

J. M. G. Le Clézio 2008

France/Mauritania (novel/poetry/short story)

Work: Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation), Désert (Desert)

Doris Lessing 2007

Britain (novel/short story)

Work: The Grass Is Singing, Cat Tales (The Old Age of El Magnifico)

Orhan Pamuk 2006

Turkey (novel, screenwriting)

Work: The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red,Snow, The Museum of InnocenceA Strangeness in My Mind

Harold Pinter 2005

UK (drama, screenplay)

Work: screenplay: The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981),The Trial (1993), Sleuth (2007). Drama: The Birthday Party, The Homecoming

Nobel Laureates 2015-2010

Svetlana Alexievich 2015

Belarus (born in Ukraine SSR) (Soviet history/essay)

Work: Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Patrick Modiano 2014

France (novel)

Work: Lacombe, Lucien (1974) (screenplay), The Occupation Trilogy

Alice Munro 2013

Canada (short story)

Work: Dance of the Happy Shades, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Progress of Love 

管謨業 Mo Yan 2012

China (novel/short story)

Work: 红高粱家族 Red Sorghum, 丰乳肥臀  Big Breasts & Wide Hips, 酒国 The Republic of Wine:

Tomas Tranströmer 2011

Sweden (poetry/translation)

Work: Baltics, For the Living and the Dead, The Great Enigma

Mario Vargas Llosa 2010

Peru/Spain (essay/novel)

La ciudad y los perros, García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (essay)