An editor, por favor?

So, I’m still reading Don Quixote, getting well along in the first volume. It seems that Senor Cervantes was badly in need of an editor. In the first edition of the book, Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, though that scene does not appear in the text, and the same fate is met by Don Quixote’s sword. Characters refer to the thefts and the objects turn up missing off and on. Some of this is addressed in the second edition, which came out a few months later. Some of the chapter epigraphs are out of order in the first edition, too.

There’s at least one, and perhaps two, longish novellas in the middle of the first book, too, which bring the story to a thundering halt. Quixote, Panza and some traveling companions stop at an inn, where the innkeeper produces some books, one of which is read in toto. It has little bearing on the story except as an example of a tale of chivalry. I skipped it—the book is long enough as it is and a fifty or sixty-page self-contained story just didn’t meet with my expectations at that point. I may go back and read it later as a standalone.

It really is a clever book in places. Sancho Panza takes to calling his master the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. Quixote decides that the person who is writing down their adventures must have come up with this name, and thus he adopts it like a medal, an interesting bit of metafiction. The story is written in artificial layers—Cervantes claims to be transcribing a tale that was told by an Arabic writer, which is in turn an account of the “real” adventures of Quixote and Panza.

I finished my Cemetery Dance column this weekend, essentially the only writing I accomplished. Now that that is off my plate for the next two months (except for updates to the online version, including one yesterday) it’s time to get back to Missing Persons, which I’ve ignored for far too long—or maybe just long enough to be able to revise it with a detached eye.

Harriet Klausner reviewed (favorably) The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book. The last sentence is amusing: Of course adding to the pleasure, this reviewer trounced her spouse. Perhaps TMI?

I’m looking forward to a return to Lost this week, where we are supposed to learn more about Eko. It’s been too long. Darned holidays.