Monsignor Quixote: A Preview and Reading Schedule
Join us starting November 18 to read Graham Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote with Yiyun Li
It is tradition to end the year with an APS Together hosted by Yiyun Li. Since 2020, she has generously shared some of her favorite books with us, including War and Peace (twice!), Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and Villette by Charlotte Brontë. We are delighted to welcome her back to APS Together, and to invite you to join us to read Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene together this November. As always, we will read slowly, consistently, and miscellaneously. We start Monday, November 18. Yiyun's daily notes will be posted here every morning, and she will join us for an online discussion of the novel on Tuesday, December 3. A preview, and the reading schedule, are below.
A Note from Yiyun Li
Let me start with a moment in Leopoldo Duran’s Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel, Monsignor Quixote, a retelling of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, leaning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing… With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.”
The clash and the harmony between the holy and the secular, belief and make-belief, faith and entertainment, the pending death of Monsignor Quixote—a fictional character, whose Sancho in the novel is an ex-mayor, a Communist—and the pending death of Father Juan in the not too distant future: one has a sense that one enters, at that moment, the quintessential Greene-land.
For our next APS Together, I would like to read a novel that is hilarious and alarming, philosophical and dramatic, prescient and introspective—Don Quixote would be suitable, so is Monsignor Quixote. The discussion of politics, history, and dictatorship in the novel may prove important for this year.
Daily Reading
The reading schedule refers to the Penguin Classic editions of Monsignor Quixote.
Day 1 (November 18) Part I, Chapter I (pp. 3-16)
Day 2 (November 19) Part I, Chapter II (pp. 7-29)
Day 3 (November 20) Part I, Chapter III (pp. 30-37)
Day 4 (November 21) Part I, Chapter IV, Part 1 (pp. 38-45)
Day 5 (November 22) Part I, Chapter IV, Parts 2-3 (pp. 46-56)
Day 6 (November 23) Part I, Chapter V (pp. 57-64, through “They can see your socks.”)
Day 7 (November24) Part I, Chapter V (pp. 64-78)
Day 8 (November 25) Part I, Chapter VI-VII (pp. 79-87)
Day 9 (November 26) Part I, Chapter VIII (pp. 88-100)
Day 10 (November 27) Part I, Chapter IX-X, Part 1 (pp. 101-118)
Day 11 (November 28) Part I, Chapter X, Parts 2-3 (pp. 118-128)
Day 12 (November 29) Part II, Chapter I (pp. 131-145)
Day 13 (November 30) Part II, Chapter II (pp. 146-159)
Day 14 (December 1) Part II, Chapter III (pp. 160-176)
Day 15 (December 2) Part II, Chapter IV, 1-2 (pp. 177-185)
Day 16 (December 3) Part II, Chapter IV, 3-4 (pp. 185-195)
Yiyun Li is the author of several novels, including The Book of Goose (FSG); Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; three story collections, most recently Wednesday’s Child (FSG); the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (both Random House); and Tolstoy Together (A Public Space Books). The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Windham-Campbell Prize, she is a contributing editor to A Public Space and teaches at Princeton University.
Graham Greene (1904-1991) was an English writer and journalist. His numerous novels include Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1941), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The Quiet American (1955). His books also include the autobiographies A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980) and several story collections. In 1986 he was awarded Britain’s Order of Merit. A new volume of his selected stories, edited by Yiyun Li, will be published by Vintage Classics next year.
Thank god I thought you guys were gone forever 😭
Great to have you back