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Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie · 2019
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"Quichotte, an aging traveling salesman obsessed with the "unreal real" of TV, falls in impossible love with a queen of the screen; while obsessively writing her love letters, he wishes an imaginary son, Sancho, into existence. Together they set off across America in Quichotte's trusty Chevy Cruze to find her and convince her of his love. Meanwhile, Quichotte's tragicomic story is being told by the author who created him: Brother, a mediocre spy novelist in the midst of a midlife crisis. As their stories intertwine, we are taken on a wild, picaresque journey through a country on the edge of moral and spiritual collapse. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie brings us a new twist on a classic.…
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"This is a big book, and he’s doing his stuff, and he’s doing his stuff brilliantly. It’s a really full-on, absolutely uncompromising maximalist novel. It’s very entertaining, clever and politically acute. Once you read it, you look at this guy who’s trying to take on Cervantes and see that he gives him a good run. It’s a huge ambition, and he’s pulled it off on his own crazy terms. If you love storytelling and you love popular culture, this is just a dream book because it rips along. At the same time, it is an astonishingly careful and lucid engagement with Don Quixote , the greatest novel of the European tradition. There’s a pleasure just in the game as they play with each other. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s both wildly unfamiliar and really pleasingly recognizably Rushdie at the top of his game. So yes, it’s a good, good book, but not unlike Atwood, the bar is set high for him. I don’t want to have something that wasn’t as good as Midnight’s Children on the list. I wanted something wonderful, and he’s delivered it."
"I just read Salman Rushdie's Quichotte, a loose remake of Don Quixote. It's a terrific read."