We end up in a literary hall of mirrors, as he flirts with every genre he’s ever clapped eyes on, paying dues to Alice in Wonderland, Moby-Dick, Pinocchio, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Nabokov’s Lolita.
Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted 14th novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination. But here, Quichotte must adjust to a post-truth world, where “visions and other phantasmagoria are to be expected”. One of the tropes of the realist novel is the clash between illusions and reality – the individual who must adjust their ideals in order to live in the real world. Broken times they may be, but as India, America and Britain lurch to the right, their fates appear conjoined in a globalised world.ĭon Quixote is often credited as the first realist novel in western literature. Rushdie argues that such broken migrant families are the “best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth”. The Author is tormented by his estrangement from his son and his lawyer sister, “Jack”, who is dying of cancer in London. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world endsīut their quest is soon revealed as a story within a story, written by an Indian-born spy novelist as a late-in-life attempt at experimental fiction. On their travels, Quichotte and Sancho duly encounter racists, opioids, humans who turn into mastodons, crickets who speak Italian and guns that talk. But even the most unlikely romance seems possible in the “Age-of-Anything-Can-Happen”.
( From the publisher.Just as Cervantes’s hidalgo lost his mind after reading too many romances, so Quichotte has had his brain addled by trash TV. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse.Īnd with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction. Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where "Anything-Can-Happen." Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. A dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age-a tour de force that is as much an homage to an immortal work of literature as it is to the quest for love and family, by Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie.
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