I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed this mock-epic; I have not very much enjoyed what little Byron I've read in the past. Part of the pleasure comes from the cleverness of the verse form,
ottava rima:
I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.
Byron managed to write over two thousand stanzas in this form - a rough-and-ready iambic pentameter, rhymed ABABABCC, where the last two lines form something of an
envoi or punchline to the preceding six.
Another aspect of my enjoyment was Byron's sheer frustration of expectations.
For example, Don Juan doesn't really seduce any women in the course of all those stanzas. There are a few -- three, if I recall correctly -- with whom he comes to mutually satisfactory arrangements, a fourth who attempts to seduce him and fails due to the untimely arrival of her husband, and a fifth whom he would like to seduce but does not, falling instead into the arms of a sixth as the poem ends.
That's right: Juan is not carried off by Satan, nor does he have any other suitable ending. The poem more or less peters out, for which Byron cannot really be blamed, as he died at that point.
Another way in which Byron frustrates expectations, is by having entire cantos where almost nothing happens. Byron takes the digression common in epics to extreme levels
I quickly figured out that the name of his protagonist, though Spanish, was not pronounced "hwan," but "joo-ahn;" indeed all non-English names and words, with the exception of Latin mottos, are, for purposes of rhythm and rhyme, pronounced as if they were upper-class English of Byron's time, at least as best as I can figure it.
The story? It begins, once Byron gets around to it, with Juan's birth, quickly goes past his childhood, and, as a teenager, brings him in contact with a married lady with whom he shares a will-they-or-won't-they relationship until, of course, they do.
When they are discovered by her husband, he divorces her and she becomes a nun; his family sends him away on a ship, which fairly quickly gets first becalmed, then, when un-becalmed by a storm, wrecked. Juan is the only survivor, and, on an uncharted (but Greek) island, is taken in by a pirate's daughter, until the pirate finds out about it.
The pirate sells him into slavery. He is bought by a eunuch, who has been instructed to do so by his mistress, a wife of the Sultan of, well, it never does say of where; but as she is preparing to have her way with him, the Sultan unexpectedly shows up.
We next see him joining the Russians in assaulting a Turkish town; when they are successful, and he shows not only heroism but gallantry (rescuing a small Turkish girl), he is sent (with the girl) as a messenger to Catherine the Great -- which puts a definite time frame on the whole thing.
Catherine takes him as her latest lover, and, when this becomes inconvenient to her, sends him to England as a special envoy. While he is envoying, he plots to seduce a young lady, unmasks a ghost, and then Byron dies after writing fourteen stanzas of a seventeenth canto.
The whole thing is, in fact, a hoot and a half, as a college friend of mine used to say.
Eight of ten stoned guests.