How would you feel if you heard that a book had been written about you without your knowledge or permission? You would worry, I’m sure, about how it portrayed you. Unfortunately, Don Quixote has just learned from Sancho Panza that a book of their exploits is spreading across Europe and the book portrays him a madman and Sancho a fool. The knight dispatches his chubby squire to fetch the bachelor who has read the book El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha.
Continue reading “When a Reader Enters a Book: Sampson and Quixote”
In Pasolini’s filmed version of The Decameron, he inexplicably leaves off Boccaccio’s frame story of a group of seven women and three men who retire to an estate in the country to avoid the plague that is ravaging Florence. There they tell each other stories to entertain, to cheer, and to instruct each other. Pasolini instead jumps right into a story, plays it out, then moves to another without explanation. He tells some interesting stories (and some of them are very sexy), but the film left me wondering why? What’s the point?
