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language: Spanish
country: Spain
year: 2010
form: novel
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 23.6.22-6.8.22
I finally finished Házael G.’s Quijote Z. this was one of the most disappointing books I’ve read in a long time, which is why it took me so long to actually get through it.
the premise — Don Quijote but he’s a zombie hunter — sounds incredible. the beginning of the main narrative — I’ll talk about the prologue in a second — is also incredible: literally the first sentence begins, “En un lugar de la zombificada Mancha”. love it. the next page explicitly says that DQ’s problem is that he has lost the ability to distinguish between “aquellos zombis escritos que nada más vivían entre las páginas” and “los que eran de carnes y huesos y caminaban por la Tierra persiguiendo y destrozando a los sobrevivientes que todavía estaban vivos” — in other words, that our ingenious protagonist has gotten so caught up in literary zombies that he has lost sight of the real ones.
THIS IS NOT TRUE. for the entire remaining 330-ish pages of the main narrative, almost every single person Don Quijote and Sancho meet is like, “what the fuck is a zombie???” and has no idea what he’s talking about. there are a few people (the priest and the barber, the innkeeper and his family) who are aware of zombie narratives and have even read and enjoyed some, but the plot of Quijote Z is ultimately just a tediously mainstream interpretation of the Quijote, retold in some cases with verbatim phrasing from the original, but with all of the chivalric romance signifiers replaced by zombie narrative references. some of these were mildly clever, or at least gratifying in that I recognized the Spanish-language texts they referred to. most of them were not. and ultimately it suffers from the same problem that Cervantes does: no understanding of its main character. ultimately, if I wanted to read hundreds of pages of a smug narration constantly making fun of DQ I’d just read the original, since at least it’s considered a classic.
there are also. some changes. the most important of these is the removal of Dorotea from the Micomicona episode and the return to the inn. instead of the priest and the barber recruiting a random woman they met to pretend to be the princess, the priest dresses up in drag, and the rest of the novel is full of “jokes” about how stupid DQ is for not being able to see that the “princess” is really a man in a dress. it’s like a 80 pages of the transmisogynist evil/disgusting/laughable man in a dress trope, and it’s clear that both the author and the characters think this is adding humor to the sequence.
nothing about the original version of this sequence would have been impossible to execute — since there are no actual zombies, they could still have just…met a woman in the forest and convinced her to help them out. which means Házael González actively chose to make this change in order to go “haha, it’s a man in a dress! isn’t that silly and gross? how stupid Don Quijote is that he can’t tell the difference between a real woman and a man in a dress!” I hate it.
the only saving grace of the novel proper is that he was clearly having a blast with imitating the language of the Quijote, and the fun he was having with the construction of sentences does come through in the text.
now, let’s talk about the prologue, which is the other — but still problematic — saving grace of the book. the prologue is a 90-ish-page narration of Cervantes’s encounter with a zombie at the Battle of Lepanto. this in itself is cool, and unlike the bulk of the novel it’s clear in this case that there was an actual zombie. unfortunately the introduction of the zombie is a) as a victim of the inhuman cruelty of evil Muslims and b) as originating in a ~primitive~ and ~savage~ ritual from ~Africa~ (specifically what’s now Equatorial Guinea; kudos I guess for at least acknowledging that Spain has a history of colonialism in Africa). positioning the white, Christian(? more on this in a second) protagonist as victim of an ~African~ curse who must now fight off a wave of indistinguishably evil Muslim invaders would be a dubious look no matter what, but writing and publishing this narrative in the context of Spanish border and immigration policy in the 2010s feels…charged. in a bad way.
HOWEVER. the story also spends 90 pages exploring the idea that Cervantes may have been a converso or of converso descent, through the character of Isaac, a converso friend of Cervantes who guides him through the zombie encounter. Isaac is FASCINATING, and as well as being fascinating in his own right, the narrative uses him to draw attention to some of the fissures internal to Cervantes’s character, particularly his (over)performance of and anxiety around Christianity over the course of this zombified night and day. this was by far the best-executed and most interesting part of the book.
unfortunately…everything else.
moods: adventurous