Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Rushdie follows his last scathing best-seller, The Golden House (2017), with an exuberantly imagined and lacerating homage to the revered satire, Don Quixote. As Cervantes did four centuries ago, Rushdie attributes his tragicomic tale of a delusional romantic to another author, a midlist, Indian American crime writer using the pen name Sam Duchamp, who believes that his spy novels have put him in actual danger. While he tries to sort out his escalating travails, he finds himself writing a strange story about a chivalric, retired traveling pharmaceutical salesman utterly bewitched and befuddled by his marathon television immersions. No longer able to distinguish between truth and lies, reality and TV, he embarks on a cross-country quest to woo his beloved, Salma, a superstar talk-show host. Taking the name Quichotte from a French opera about the legendary knight-errant, he conjures up a TV-spawned teenage son to accompany him on the road and, of course, calls him Sancho. This spellbinding, many-limbed saga of lives derailing in the "Age of Anything-Can-Happen" is a wily frolic and a seismic denunciation. Rushdie meshes shrewd, parodic humor with intensifying suspense and pervasive sympathy, seeding this picaresque doomsday adventure with literary and television allusions and philosophical musings. As his vivid, passionate, and imperiled characters are confronted with racism, sexism, displacement, family ruptures, opioid addiction, disease, cyber warfare, and planetary convulsions, they valiantly seek the transcendence of love.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Quichotte
Some stories are eternal, and while writers don't necessarily repeat them word-for-word through the generations, they are capable of crafting compelling echoes that evoke both the time we're in and the universal emotional constants of humanity. Evoking that sense of universality becomes more difficult when you're telling a story that's an open homage to one of the most famous and influential works of literature in human history, but in his insightful and wickedly funny way, Salman Rushdie pulls it off with Quichotte.
A retelling of Don Quixote, Quichotte follows a man who, on a quest to win the heart of a daytime TV star, has redubbed himself "Quichotte" (pronounced "Key-shot") and committed his life to the pure pursuit of what he calls "The Beloved." To aid him in his quest, he imagines a son called Sancho, and the two journey together on a road trip through a half-imagined, enchanted version of the American landscape, staying in hotels where the TV is always on.
Quichotte and Sancho's story is woven through a metanarrative, as Rushdie reveals that their story is actually being imagined by a man who writes spy novels under the pen name Sam DuChamp. DuChamp and Quichotte's stories are both, in their ways, tributes to Cervantes' epic quest for love and acceptance, full of journeys to redemption and understanding in a world that seems to have gone mad around them, and it's in this metafictional journey that Rushdie's already witty and precise prose really comes alive. By structuring Quichotte as a narrative within a narrative, he's given himself an inventive way to say something about a world obsessed with everything from reality television to hacktivism.
Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope, and yet it never feels too weighty or self-serious. Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
A modern Don Quixote lands in Trumpian America and finds plenty of windmills to tilt at. Mix Rushdie's last novel, The Golden House (2017), with his 1990 fable, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and you get something approaching this delightful confection. An aging salesman loses his job as a pharmaceutical rep, fired, with regret, by his cousin and employer. The old man, who bears the name Ismail Smile, Smile itself being an Americanization of Ismail, is "a brown man in America longing for a brown woman." He is a dreamer—and not without ambition. Borrowing from both opera and dim memories of Cervantes, he decides to call himself Quichotte, though fake news, the din of television, and "the Age of Anything-Can-Happen" and not dusty medieval romances have made him a little dotty. His Dulcinea, Salma R, exists on the other side of the TV screen, so off Quichotte quests in a well-worn Chevy, having acquired as if by magic a patient son named Sancho, who observes that Dad does everything just like it's done on the tube and in stories: "So if the old Cruze is our Pe quod then I guess Miss Salma R is the big fish and he, 'Daddy,' is my Ahab." By this point, Rushdie has complicated the yarn by attributing it to a hack writer, another Indian immigrant, named Sam DuChamp (read Sam the Sham), who has mixed into the Quixote story lashings of Moby-Dick, Ismail for Ishmael, and the Pinocchio of both Collodi and Disney ("You can call me Jiminy if you want," says an Italian-speaking cricket to Sancho along the way), to say nothing of the America of Fentanyl, hypercapitalism, and pop culture and the yearning for fame. It's a splendid mess that, in the end, becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization: "What vanishes when everything vanishes," Rushdie writes, achingly, "not only everything, but the memory of everything." Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Best-of-the-Booker Rushdie revisits the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance—except now the story goes contemporary, with a traveling salesman falling for a TV star and marching across America to prove himself worthy. As Rushdie told the
Library Journal Reviews
This latest from Rushdie (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Rushdie's rambunctious latest (following