| Title | : | Don Quixote (which was a dream) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0802131921 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780802131928 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1986 |
In this visionary world, Don Quixote journeys through American history to the final dys of the Nixon administration, passing on the way through a New York reminiscent of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg and a brutally defamiliarized contemporary London. Here transvestites who might play at being Nazis and beautiful she-males enact the rituals of courtly love. Presiding overt this late-twentieth-century Levithian is Thomas Hobbes--the Angel of Death.
Don Quixote (which was a dream) Reviews
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A Post-Modernist Critique of Catholicism and Capitalism
Kathy Acker's “Don Quixote" is not just a consummate post-modernist novel, it's a virtual treatise on the characteristics that define such a novel. Moreover, it advocates a literary form of socio-political activism.
Until the third and last section of the novel, it seemed as if its debt to Cervantes'
“Don Quixote" was superficial (perhaps a mere framing device), one that was almost matched by the appropriation of other works and literary techniques, such as
“Pale Fire",
“The Leopard", and “Pandora's Box" (the Lulu part of the middle section).
However, the last section adapts and reinforces Cervantes’ critique of the institutions of Catholicism, Christianity and religion (discussed in my review of Cervantes' novel earlier this year).
The Hot Mess of Identity
Identity (not to mention love, gender and sexuality) is a core theme of the novel. Characters aren’t singular entities. They have multiple aspects, which decenter and destabilise them in an almost schizophrenic fashion. The subject is fluid, as is the object, so that they flow into each other. (“I can be – whoever I want...I can do anything I can be anyone one day and the next day do be anyone else, even the same one. I'm as unpredictable as these winds.”)
Occasionally, it's difficult to identify and understand who is talking to whom. The reader is entrapped by and in the instability. Kathy Acker decenters and destabilises both the subject and the reader. It's a hot mess. This aggravated me for the first 35 pages, but then I realised this was probably the point, and I had to defer judgement until the end.
Madonna Quixote
In the first section, a pregnant woman decides to have an abortion after the end of her relationship. Deprived of a conventional identity, she co-opts the name of Don Quixote in order to embark on her new journey and adventure. You could almost call her Donna (or Madonna) Quixote.
If you adopt the normal interpretation of Don Quixote, it's ironic that Acker has chosen this character as her model: The woman “knew that this world's conditions are so rough for any single person, even a rich person, that person has to make do with what she can find: this’s no world for idealism.”
The conventional view is that Don Quixote is so idealistic in his pursuit of love that those around him regard him as crazy and insane.
Acker’s woman likewise longs for (or to) love. She asks, “Why can't I just love?” Must you have somebody to love?
The response (a linguistic one) is, “Because every verb to be realised needs its object. Otherwise, having nothing to see, it can't see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or communication, I need an object which is both subject and object...” Only it's problematic when both people are multi-faceted or decentered.
Acker plays with the words “knight" and “night": After the abortion, “All night our nurses’ll watch over you, and in the morning, you'll be a nìght.” In the realm of myth, the male Don Quixote represents light or day, while the female represents darkness or night.
Right Every Wrong
Love, for Acker and her female Don Quixote, has a dual function: “By loving another person, she would right every manner of political, social, and individual wrong: she would put herself in those situations so perilous the glory of her name would resound.”
Acker goes beyond sexual relationships, and explores power and control in a social and political context, even if it is men who are in a position to dominate and subjugate.
Revolution, Chaos and Self-Destruction
In the third section, Don Quixote identifies that people are the victims of “evil enchanters", and seeks to remedy their plight.
We all inhabit “prisons of self-determinacy":
“[We want] to wallow in the outside world. [We wallow] in all the hatred and filth that is outside. Nowadays, only the family stands against hatred and filth. On a political level, hatred is revolution. On a social level, it's chaos. On a personal level, self-destruction. You [exist] in revolution, chaos and self-destruction.”
In a passage that resonates in the context of Brexit, one of the characters predicts:
“If a progressive ‘second revolution' still does not take place in England, then a conservative counter-revolution will; and in that case the movements toward Scottish, Welsh, and even Ulster independence will acquire added progressive impetus and lustre, as relatively left-wing causes saving themselves from central reaction.”
The third section resumes the sexual political journey, before morphing into a more socio-political agenda. It even takes on the family:
“My family protests the way I am. The fact that I am this way. I'm conscious that my refusal, my refusal upon refusal, my double mutiny that mutiny, this momentary attempt of mine to be a whole human, renders me liable to [my family's] disgusting penalties. Like any other rebel slave, perverse rebel, I resolve, now and forever, with total desperation, always to go to all lengths.” (Sancho Panza/St Simeon/the dog)
All Story-Telling is Revolution
So, to be a whole human, one must embrace the personal, the sexual, the social, the political, the rebellious, the revolting, the revolutionary.
Acker's Don Quixote responds, “If pornography is that which incites its listeners to degeneracy, violence, and rioting questioning, what you're telling me is pornographic.”
St Simeon counters that “All stories or narratives, being stories of revolt, are revolt...These stories or revolts are especially revolts against parents. Why? Because parents have control, not only over children, but also – to the extent that adults're products of their childhood – over everyone. In order to live or be human, the self must seize control.”
Yet, it's not as easy as it sounds. Acker’s Don Quixote recognises that:
“I'm a mess. Since I objectively know who I am, this’s who I am. Since I'm a mess or have no control over any of my emotions, these emotions take me over. These emotions're so fierce, I must be controlled. This's why love's control for me.”
Still, she pleads for love and tenderness, even heterosexual kindness and gentleness. “Without the touch of another human being, I'm nothing.” Yet, within pages, she realises that touching the other (a female, this time) is “in some way detrimental to her identity/self-determination/separation-from-me".
The Religious White Men
Ultimately, Don Quixote recognises that “What concerns me, is me.” She believes that religion is the problem. She promises St Simeon the dog that “I will now lead you in a fight against the religious white men and against all the alienation that their religious image-making or control brings to humans.” She is promising to assault Catholic faith in which the Lord declares that “You have to give up your self.”
Religion enchants and enslaves believers:
“In my vision, those who're enchanted, since they're no longer in touch with their own bodies, have no idea what their needs are...
“Since Jesus Christ made his disciples sleep on beds of thorns, religion is enchantment.”
To resist the enchantment, Don Quixote must resort to language, poetry and song:
“It is necessary to sing, that is to be mad, because otherwise You have to live with the straights, the compromises, the mealy-mouths, the reality-deniers, the laughter-killers. It is necessary to be mad, that is to sing, because it's not possible for a knight, or for anyone, to foray successfully against the owners of this world.”
The Language of Freaks
Don Quixote concludes:
“Language being a form of communication is a political occurrence...
“Language presupposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning. Without love or language, I do not exist. We who are freaks have only friendship.
“It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you...I'm talking about the self and others. Where are there possibilities of lives of feeling and touching?”
“This, my first and final dream, is not the dream of capitalism.”
Newly awoke to the world, Kathy Acker used her novel(s) partly to call for and mobilise a political occurrence against religion and capitalism.
It's not clear whether the reference to a "dream" in the title of the novel is to an illusion or a vision. Whatever, it remained unrealized, except in the realm of fiction, at the time of Kathy Acker's death. Which is, at least, a start.
VERSE:
[In the Words of Kathy Acker]
Clues to the Spirit
And at the end of time
Prior to the morning
When even your own home’s backs
Shrink in fear from all skies
Truffled by gun fire,
When your feet fear
The soul’s erosion
And the ground crumbling
Beneath them,
Until the point that
There is no more ground,
When even straights sense
This decay of their world,
We have the clues
To the spirit.
The Real History
Our suffering has been is
And will be the anger,
The real history,
The hammer and wrench
By which we, inch by inch,
Forge the glorious orb of our sun.
There is You, Knight
Because with every night's onset
The sun sinks below its horizon,
Because there are no more new stories,
No more tracks, no more memories:
There is you, knight.
Awoke to the World
Since I am no more, forget Me.
Forget morality.
Forget about saving the world.
Make Me up.
I closed my eyes,
Head drooping,
Like a person drunk
For so long
She no longer knows
She's drunk,
And then, drunk,
Awoke to the world
Which lay before me.
Freak Flag Flying
Even freaks need homes,
Countries, language,
Communication.
SOUNDTRACK:
Soul II Soul - "A Dream's A Dream"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE18q...
Soul II Soul - "Holding On"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YKTo... -
‘This is a nuclear world so if you're not sci-fi, you're not canine.’
Acker disrupts the borders between prose and poetry in her book, but more ‘prose’ than poetry than (for instance) Maggie Nelson’s
Bluets. The context and tone are far more intense than I’d imagined; poetically intense, on the verge of ‘raging’. Having read Acker, I can see how she is a rather ‘influential’ writer but not an easy one to ‘follow’. It makes me think of Kraus (
Torpor), and how Kraus must have been heavily ‘influenced’ by Acker’s writing (even though, in my opinion, Kraus’ work felt like a failed or weak imitation). But as I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s certainly not easy to mimic Acker’s style – it’s very distinctive and powerfully so. But I can also get why one would want to try as her ‘style’ is truly impressive.‘The world beyond time. The bloody outline of a head on every desk in the world. The bloody outline of alienated work. The bloody outline of foetuses. There's no more need to imagine. Blood is dripping down our fingertips while we're living dreams. When the living have woken wake will wake up, the veins of the night are metal. Her head is the foetuses of nuclear waste . . .’
Do I understand every single thing that Acker has packed into her book? No. And that has more to do with me than Acker. I’m not well-read enough, and too ignorant about the historical and political context that Acker has used and (to be honest) ripped apart into a Frankenstein-ey mess. But I can imagine I’d be able to appreciate Acker’s writing a whole lot more if I was more aware/conscious of it all. This may or may not have to do with me completely forgetting what I’d learned about the Cold War during sixth forms because I was much too obsessed with tennis then. As in – watching tennis tournaments (from Djokovic to Rafa; but no longer a ‘fan’ of either now that I don’t play and/or watch tennis anymore). Prior to writing this review, I’d written many pages worth of it, but had to put that aside because most of it was too personal and irrelevant to Acker’s book. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood when I was finishing the book, but it (ironically) brought me a sense of strange comfort. Make of that what you will.'All she ever used to do was read books.'
'You're right,' the Leftist, who refused to drink in pubs, replied. 'She had no relations to other people. She didn't like them and she was aphasic.'
The Liberal: 'If she's evil, we must be evil too. No man's an island.'
'What about women?' asked the feminist, but no one listened to her. While the Leftist, who never listened to anyone but himself, answered, 'Books or any forms of culture're so dangerous, for they turn people mad, for instance Baudelaire or other pornographers, only our upper classes must be allowed to indulge in them.’
Shamelessly transgressive and well precise. Political criticism and satire in fiction can so easily be written astray; and become/be presented in a rant-ey, self-indulgent manner. Not with Acker. I’m in awe of how she has embedded so many different matters and ‘historical events/figures’ into her writing without turning her book into something dense/heavy or unpalatable and lacking clarity. Acker’s writing is undoubtably ‘explicit’. All of that with a side of nuclear waste, dildos, blood, and abortions. Not for everyone, but if you have the stomach for it, you’ll be in for a treat.‘"What if," the bitch, (excuse me, dog), continues, "by 'love' you meant I was allowed to want you? Then we'd both be objects and subjects. Then sexual love would have to be the meeting-place of individual life and death."
‘Fucking, food, and dancing. This is the American Revolution.’
The blurbs were quite deceptive (in my opinion). They were suspiciously presented in such a brief and unclear way anyway. But that actually worked in the (new) readers’ favour. Perhaps, to know less about the book before reading it enhances the reading experience for this one. Just don’t go in with the expectation that you’ll understand all of it and be sure that you’ll be okay with that. Definitely a book that is interesting enough to return to at a later date. Acker’s exploration of ‘love’ isn’t of the conventional, ‘Hallmark’ sorts. I can’t precisely describe what she’s trying to say about it without having to write a few pages of just me rambling about it and going nowhere with it. Despite the ambiguities in Acker’s writing, the core of it lies within the importance of ‘human’ feelings. The ‘dog’ in the book is anthropomorphised to emphasise that. That bit felt slightly Bob-Waksberg (
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory but more in the sense of 'BoJack Horseman') to me, so there’s nothing to complain about.‘I can't give you any papers because I don't have an identity yet. I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge and I'm not English. This's why your law says I have to stay in this inn overnight. As soon as you dub me a knight - by tomorrow morning - and I have a name, I'll be able to give you my papers.'
The receptionist, knowing that all women who're about to have abortions're crazy, assured the woman her abortion'ld be over by nighttime. 'I, myself,' the receptionist confided, 'used to be mad. I refused to be a woman the way I was supposed to he. I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble. I prostituted myself, ran a few drugs - nothing hard - , exposed my genitalia to strange men while picking their pockets, broke-and-entered, lied to the only men I loved, told the men I didn't love the truth that I could never love them, fucked one man after another while telling each man I was being faithful to him alone, fucked men over, for, by fucking me over, they had taught me how to fuck them over. Generally, I was a bitch.’
‘Then I learned the error of my ways. I retired . . . from myself. Here . . . this little job . . . I'm living off the income and property of others. Rather dead income and property. Like any good bourgeois,' ending her introduction. 'This place,' throwing open her hands, 'our sanctus sanitarium, is all of your place of safety. Here, we will save you. All of you who want to share your money with us.' The receptionist extended her arms. 'All night our nurses'll watch over you, and in the morning,' to Don Quixote, 'you'll be a night.' The receptionist asked the knight-to-be for her cash.’
‘I'm broke.'
'Why?'
'Why should I pay for an abortion? An abortion is nothing.'
'You must know that nothing's free.’ -
Although it's weird, my project of reading Kathy Acker's novels backwards in time, and so my reading of the movement from novel to novel is perhaps bassackward, I sensed an interesting shift between Don Quixote and its follow up Empire of the Senseless. While these two novels stand out, for me, in Acker's oeuvres as the two narrative (rather than thematically-organized) novels--this one framed by Cervantes's classic and Empire... by the classic misadventures of a separated couple of an ancient Greek romance and all of that genre's many Medieval romance and novelistic offspring--there's a thoughtfulness and absence of violence that marks this novel from the author's last four--from Empire... to Pussy, King of the Pirates. Even though pirates do appear here--quite briefly at the end--they're not rampaging in violent taboo-breaking mayhem as they do in the novels to follow. Even My Mother: Demonology, the only one of the latter novels bereft, if I recall correctly, of violent revolution and piracy, has so much personal, S&M violence, that it fits in fine with the latter stage of Acker's fiction--I guess we could call them the mid-1980s to mid-1990s novels or, the mature Grove Press years.
How do I read this shift? Well, the bullying and horror of the Reagan years, homelessness, and general economic desperation were becoming more than evident in the U.S.A. by 1985-6 when Don Quixote was being written and published. I, myself, wrote my first novel in 1986, exploring the possibility of armed struggle against the new cultural fascism but rejecting it for a more personal, internal revolution through art in my own works to follow. Perhaps '86 was that watershed year when we pacifists turned violence loose inside of ourselves and our art when the fascists came that much closer and we felt threatened. Whatever the reason, I loved this novel for its more reasoned, reasonable, and entertaining strategies having less to do with the violence and violent taboo breaking so evident in Empire of the Senseless. Not that the world situation wasn't all the more dire as Acker went on to write Empire..., and that the strategy wasn't wholly necessary, I just prefer this approach as a reader.
Admittedly, there are a few dead spots in this conglomerate novelistic construction--part and parcel to Acker's cut up and appropriating style. But the opening and closing sections are such fabulous meditations on politics, gender issues, religion, and American history, while, at the same time, capturing and adapting the spirit of the original Don Quixote's magic, that they are among Acker's best pages. Also, the chorus of dogs and other characters actually bring Don Quixote closer to Mikhail Bakhtine's definition of a novel as a dialogic rhetorical exercise. Here points of view are juxtaposed, confronted, re-routed, re-arranged, untied, re-thought, and always left unresolved. I like such thoughtful writing--a series of overlapping and self-contradictory phrases, in the end. This is why art so easily outstrips propaganda--it argues against itself. It makes you think rather than tries to convince you to believe something--which always turns out to be a scam in the end: some old man's capitalist scheme to get your money. -
I'd been curious about Kathy Acker; I knew of her work by reputation only, but she once did an interview with Alasdair Gray that I found interesting and insightful, so I guess I was already favorably predisposed. And thus, when I was having dinner at a friend's house and saw some of Acker's books on her husband's shelves--her husband being the more po-mo half of the couple--I called in a favor ("How many of my Julian Barnes books do you have in your possession right now?") and borrowed them.
Well. Whoa.
For one thing, I was reading this book in parallel with my friend's husband's annotations, which...is actually something I recommend. Not necessarily reading Michael's annotations (although they're quite good), but following along with the marginalia and underlinings of someone you sort-of-but-don't-really know. I mean, if we're talking postmodern, it's hard to get much more fragmented and post- than that.
But the book itself is an experience, too. Acker's writing is spiky, prickly, and so are her ideas (about sex, about gender, about power, about literature). And as someone who's read a goodly amount of postmodern/experimental fiction, I'm surprised to say that her use of the various standard techniques (parody, pastiche, etc.) actually worked on me as a reader--that is, the text was unsettled and unsettling, destabilized, all of that exciting stuff that can sometimes get lost in fancy typographical tricks and footnotes or whatever.
I'll have to read more of her work, obviously, but I'm almost afraid to because Don Quixote was so...I don't know. Stunning, maybe? I feel a bit stunned by it at the moment. It's not a bad feeling to have. -
3.5*
Absolutely loved the beginning part and Acker's way with language is fantastic. Just lost me a bit in the middle and parts of the third act. Look forward to reading more of her. -
'The carcass of wood comically perched on cement paws I call "home". The style of its hair is corrugated iron that exists in the sun like skins being dried. In the diningroom, nailheads glisten from the rough floor, lines of pine and shadow run across a ceiling; the chairs are phantom; the light leaks out a gray light; the cockroaches buzzing seem about to hurt. . .
'This's vision because it's what I see.'
ADDENDUM: to be read in concurrence with Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and then to be considered: what it means if the writing (and thereby reading) of this book were taken on in the same manner as Menard's own project. -
This is the second (or third, I forget now) abortive reading of a melding of aborted texts which opens with the narrator's abortion.
I guess I am done with it for now, until I resume my aborted reading of Cervantes. -
This book is great, but between this and Judith Butler, I should probably just read a block of plutonium and get a more genuinely dense reading experience.
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Don Kihote'nin kürtaja gittiği bir kitaptı!? Kathy Acker'in işleri, Beat kuşağının bir uzantısı gibi görülse de, ben bu hikâye özelinde geçen yıl okuduğum bazı şeylere benzettim. Mesela hemen aynı dönemde Almanya, İtalya dolaylarında geçen Ulli Lust'ın bir Özgür Kız hikâyesi "Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life" vardı. Ulli Lust'ın röportajlarında, ben pek Kathy Acker sevgisinden bahsettiğini işitmesem de, kendisine bayağı bir öykündüğünü düşünüyorum. Aynı şekilde benim çok sevdiğim sert konuşmacı/yazar Fran Lebowitz var. Onun gençlik hallerini hatırladım. Dumanaltı bir mekân, elde sigara, mikrofona yaklaşıp tek hamlede on beş kişiyi deviren Fran Lebowitz; az sonra buradaki Don Kihote'ye dönüşecektir. Gardınızı alın derim... bla bla bla...
Ve zamanında ne kadar cesur yayıncılar varmış. Bugün olsa aynı kitabı seçerler miydi, diye düşünmeden edemiyorum. Müstehcenliğin çok ötesinde bir edebiyat var orada... -
a wild ride. I loved this book, but it really only holds up as a crazy proto-postmodern feminist punk piece of history. outside of the lens of understanding a point in cultural history, this book is absolute drivel. My main compulsion to read this comes from the fact I am also reading her biography, which is probably a better introduction to her than her oeuvre. Don Quixote gets an abortion and spends about a hundred pages incoherently talking with her dog companion about having sex as a woman. Richard Nixon meets the Angel of Death and talks about capitalism and nuclear waste.
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don quixote named herself on an abortion clinic table, and with her lover dog, travels history and dreams. it makes sense that "don quixote" was kathy acker's next book after "blood and guts" because it's just as good, if not better. the recurring imagery of hospitals and the constant grappling with death spooked me out, thinking of her future cancer, which would kill her almost 10 years later. i don't know if i'm supposed to think about acker's biographical information while reading her work, but i can't help it. i search for her in here constantly, and i find her sometimes -- needing love and touch, entering S&M bars, consistent S&M fantasies that feel stuck in her mind, considering her fraught yet upper-class childhood, women's desire and punishment for that, discussing how her writing had no one to compare to before sylvere (semiotexte) brought theory into the scene, and accentuating her feelings on the violence of the american government. some of the aphorisms and beautiful sentences in here feel so important to my life. it's possible they are stolen from other texts, but i don't care. she is the bearer of these revelations for me:
"It's not history, which is actuality, but history's opposite, death, which shows us that women are nothing and everything."
"Is sensuality less valuable than rational thought?"
"I want writing in the world. Is courting writing courting death?"
"The American Revolution or American freedom is a mask of death. Our nihilism and dying must be the mask of our revolution."
"When dying takes all the time, there is no time."
"My only sexuality is fear of everything I know as human. My sexuality is wanting not to exist."
"I was desperate to find some way how to live. These people here teach me nothing but isolation. I turn back to my book. To anything that teaches me about somewhere else, for there's nothing in this country but death." -
‘Human power comes, at least partly, from sexuality.’
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rambling, ambling free-form cut-up collage-esque narrative that somewhat revolves around a post modern female knight. the grail-quest theme never seemed adequately enough addressed to me, however i really enjoyed the jagged poetry of 'don quixote', how gloriously nothing made sense and the surreal format itself.
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This is closer to a 3.5
It takes a bit for both the author and the reader for that matter to find the rhythm of the book. It's interesting and at times intentionally funny once it does. -
I can understand how this book may be off putting to certain individuals. However, I found the entire novel entrancing. I dare not say more. This is a book I found so much fun reading even if it has some themes that are realistically dark.
I know this may be a novel that was written for a generation that was not my own, but It still impacted me and I am overjoyed that I have been exposed to Kathy Acker. I will seek her out in the future. -
What a fucking sock in the chest.
To quote Pete and Pete "It's like someone punched [my:] soul." -
Must Read.
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“When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself.”
One of the more interesting things about this book is that it takes on Don Quixote and remixes it. Don Quixote itself is a remixing of romantic epics (or romantic adventures) of the 1300-1500s leading to the titular Don making his way into the world supplied only with the knowledge of his reading. In the second half of that book he seeks out the author who championed his efforts. I wish Kathy Acker did the same in her modern retelling. Using the title Don Quixote, our heroine here goes out into the world seeking love and looking for it in the world of Nixonian America, and a kind of mythic London. At times the writing is funny and charming and raw, showing an erudition that Kathy Acker sometimes hides from readers and other times not as clear, experimental and vague as to the goals of the book. The book hinges on your enjoyment of the fractured nature of the writing, which is at times funny and weird, and other times weird and also weird. If you’re into it and it’s working, great! If not, watch out!
The result can be a mixed bag, and reminds me as much of Don Quixote as two other books that precede this book and I think we can at least suppose Kathy Acker might have read: Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. (I think I like both of those books better too). -
It's possible that I'm being slightly harsh with this rating seeing as it's been a few years since I read it for my English Lit course and the whole book is all over the place as it is, so definitely not helped by my fading memory. However, I do very specifically remember hating every minute of it, so I'm going to go with that feeling. It honestly was just boring and I didn't care for the way it was written, feminist retelling or not.
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No sé qué he leído ni cómo haré una monografía sobre ello. Me ha costado muchísimo seguir la lectura, digresiones larguísimas, me confundía constantemente de personajes, si hablaba de un sueño al rato me olvidaba que lo narraba era un sueño... La obra en general parece un sueño, una cacao mental. Una locura, supongo que son así las novelas posmodernas? Indiferente no te dejan seguro :)
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This is the one that sort of made me really understand the process and the concept of Acker's writing. I wish I had read it earlier in order of publication but I couldn't find a copy... and the copy I got was a bootleg!!!
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Un livre puissant !
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Not sure what I just read fantstical descriptions in hopeless negativity. Sureal, felt a little lost and was glad it was over.
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I read this book on a plane. Don't do that. Actually, I take it back: do. It's a good way to tell if someone is reading over your shoulder.
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What in the world did I just read? I think I just found my new least favorite book.
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L
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The easiest of Acker's works to understand. You won't enjoy it, per se, but you will (or should) get it at least. Think Burroughs.
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Last year I took a course in experimental fiction, and this book was one the syllabus. I bought the book off of Amazon as soon as I could, but unfortunately, because so few people in the class could acquire it, we ended up not reading the book for the class. Instead we read "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel, which now that I've read "Don Quixote", I'm thankful happened.
This is a political novel. Not just because it talks a lot about gender politics, and nuclear (dis)armament and ownership of women, but because it literally involves politicians. And it involves their spouses as well. And it involves those politicians and their spouses while they are fucking each other, while Death incarnate acts like a creepy fucking peeping Tom watching them doing it. So "Don Quixote" is a very political novel.
As far as Kathy Acker's politics go, I can't say I disagree with them all that much. But there's a problem with inserting politics into a novel, it's difficult to say that you dislike that novel without people assuming you dislike the politics. It's an annoying response. Awhile ago, I started to watch a lot of episodes of Penn and Teller's "Bullshit!" and they seemed to like Ayn Rand a lot, so I decided to read some reviews of her novels on Goodreads. I was disappointed by what I saw going on. Whenever anyone said they disliked Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead or whatever because it was long-winded or boring, someone would come along and have a row with that person about the benefits of objectivism and Ayn Rand's weird brand of libertarianism. In my mind, whether or not you agreed with her didn't matter when you judged the quality of her book. You shouldn't just excuse a poorly written book because you like a novelist's politics. I found it funny that this was the most common rebuttal. As far as Kathy Acker goes, I can say that I enjoyed her novel "Don Quixote". But I didn't enjoy it quite that much. Even though it was random in a funny and cool way, I feel like there was too much randomness to the point that the novel didn't have that much focus. Occasionally it's just incoherent. At one point, there is so much rambling about politics that there isn't much story at all and it was all downhill from there. Her particular brand of feminism doesn't seem to be that complex, a lot of the time it amounts to saying, "Hey, dudes suck, eh?" Which is annoying. And though she details quite a lot of abuse, she seems to have this strange relation to it, because she acknowledges that she doesn't like anyone consistently good. It's difficult to sympathize with the main character if this is the case. It might be her problem but it's not everyone's problem. And I really have to wonder why the book was called "Don Quixote". It's just a gimmicky thing to do. The two novels have very little in common. -
Punk poet Kathy Acker's Don Quixote is no easy read, and I do feel that she started losing me as the philosophical parables that make up most of the book piled up. Far more than Cervantes' classic retold, this story of a woman going mad after an abortion and branding herself a knight deconstructs gender in an insightful way, and presents women's narrative as a largely male creation. Despite Don Quixote herself usurping a male role from literature (and Acker poaches from the entire history of literature, not this single work), getting out from under what men have decided women should care about is next to impossible. Don't expect anything straightforward. I wouldn't call this a story so much as a manifesto, and that's perfectly legitimate, even if it did start to wear on this reader after a while.
