Word: sanchos
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...Nabokov acknowledges, Don Quixote the novel may be flawed, but Don Quixote the man is permanent. The bony knight and his fat squire, Sancho Panza, are the most recognizable duo in all of fiction. The lecturer traces their "long shadow" through the works of such disparate men as Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Had he ventured only a little further, he might have found quixotic elements in the books of Saul Bellow, John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov...
...influence does not guarantee indulgence. As the great Russian scrutinizes the great Spaniard, revisionism becomes the order of the day. Sancho's celebrated proverbs are in fact "not very mirth provoking . . . The corniest modern gag is funnier." Don Quixote's attempts to act like an old cavalier show "a rather limited schoolboyish imagination in the way of pranks." As for the author, "Cervantes. . . seems to have had alternate phases of lucidity . . . and sloppy vagueness, much as his hero was mad in patches." Don and squire wander and blunder through Spain, tilting at customs and rituals, obscure priests...
...feed the myth surrounding the feud. In essence he is only a loner and sometime petty robber preying on squalid little settlements in the region, who takes karlas an apprentice of sorts. The sincere bumbling Karl himself becomes entrenched in the Barbarosa legend, as the "baby gringo," a Sancho Panza to Barbarosa's Quixote...
...ailing little Seat (a Spanish Fiat) dubbed Rocinante, the newly elevated monsignor and his Communist companion Sancho set out for Madrid, a city that neither has seen for many years. Like Spain itself since the death of the Generalissimo, these innocents hurtle into the 20th century with ingenuous vigor. Feasting on suckling pig in Madrid's toniest restaurant or visiting the Valley of the Fallen, Spain's grandiose monument to its Civil War dead, the compañeros loudly dispute the merits of their beliefs: the Gulag vs. the Inquisition; Stalin vs. Judas; Brezhnev vs. Franco. The priest...
Unlike his ancestor, the monsignor does not tilt at windmills, but joyrides on them, producing some superlative nonsense. In the university town of Salamanca, where Sancho once studied with the philosopher Unamuno, they wander into a Spanish house of prostitution. The unsuspecting Quixote comments, "What a large staff of charming young women for so small a hotel." Ignorant of films, for example, he picks a pious-sounding title for his first viewing. X-rated grunts of A Maiden's Prayer, however, make him wonder: "They seemed to suffer such a lot. From the sounds they made." His more worldly...