I recently finished reading ‘Quichotte’, Salman Rushdie’s latest novel. It’s an interesting book and difficult to describe – part picaresque, part fantasy, part magical realism, part science fiction and so forth. It’s a modern-day retelling of Cervantes’ story of Don Quixote as a satiric and humorous portrait of America in the age of Trump. Our hero, a traveling salesman of Indian origin, becomes addled by his obsession with American television (in the original, the Don is addicted to heraldic romances). He begins to believe himself an inhabitant of “that other, brighter world” and resolves to win the heart of a beautiful television host (meet our Femme Fatale), Salma R. (who stands in for Dulcinea del Toboso – the pig raiser). Instead of Don Quixote’s old nag Rocinante, Quichotte drives an old Chevy Cruze across the United States. Where Don Quixote starts off satirizing the 17th-century addiction to chivalric romance, Rushdie’s Quichotte is “deranged by reality television,” including Salma R’s celebrated talk show.
But there is a parallel story about a writer called ‘Brother’ who has been a writer of spy fiction but now decides to write a novel about Quichotte and his travels through contemporary America. This big of metafiction almost takes over the story but Rushdie manages to connect them effectively and bring the plot to a satisfying conclusion.
Instead of Don Quixote’s old nag Rocinante, Quichotte drives an old Chevy Cruze across the United States. Where Don Quixote starts off satirizing the 17th-century addiction to chivalric romance, Rushdie’s Quichotte is “deranged by reality television,” including Salma R’s celebrated talk show.
Quichotte is a pharmaceutical salesman who is laid off near the beginning of the novel. He decides to seek the love of Salma R by journeying to Manhattan, where she lives, across an America suffering from a serious bout of unreality, helped by Fentanyl. In the course of his travels, he encounters a town where its inhabitants are gradually turning into mastodons who run rampant and are impervious to good sense. The mastodons are allegorical representatives of “all the enemies of contemporary reality: the anti-vaxxers, the climate loonies, the news paranoiacs, the UFOlogists, the president.” They are an acknowledged borrowing from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. In another episode, Sancho gets beaten up by white nationalists wearing collars (unleashed dogs of war).
It’s a fun book to read and an interesting story but it is a bit off the rails at times. I like most of Rushdie’s work and this is good but not his best. Give it a try if you have a chance. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it is definitely worth a read. HERE’s the NPR review.
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