Quichotte
As seen:
By Salman Rushdie
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1 review
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In a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age. 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.
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”.
Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work, the fully realised 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.
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Goodness me where to start. Houghton Book Group discussed this book at length after reading it for the Man Booker Prize 2019. Firstly we were all in agreement that it isn't something any of us would have chosen having had mixed experience with Salman Rushdie. We also agreed it wasn't what we were expecting, being a contemporary setting with a good deal of humour in it. However, we did feel it was a dense and wordy book with many layers and probably quite a few levels of meaning we just didn't get.
It is beautifully written with some lovely passages and turns of phrase, however the concept of an author writing a book about a character who imagines a son into being who in turn confides in an italian cricket was quite hard to follow. There did feel to be some inconsistencies, such as the bollywood actress who moved to America and becomes a world famous chat show host apparently having no social media prescence at all. It does sometimes feel there are parts of the book that are there to keep in line with following Cervantes' Don Quioxte - mastadons in New York being an example.
Possibly we needed to read Don Quioxte first. We think it will win - the books that baffle us always win.
