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. Even as Rushdie obsesses over the problems of the privileged class, his treatment of the lower strata of society is somewhat lopsided and wanting.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. The novel offers a brilliant commentary on the sabotaging effect of intolerance and bigotry in major economies of the world: the oppression of minorities in India, racism against Asians in the West, and the deteriorating political climate in the United States and the United Kingdom.Įven so, the novel is not without its flaws.
He is not the kind of storyteller who is admired by everyone, but he does not flinch from narrating the truth of the human condition. Rushdie thus shows, through this invigorating narrative, the urgency of going beyond existing definitions of love, denouncing intolerance in all forms. Fact and fiction are interspersed, and the reality of living in contemporary times is unleashed through real and fictional stories. The multifarious aspects of love and acceptance find an array of expressions in the novel. Quichotte’s conviction that “love will find a way” shapes his entire being, and this rumination dominates his life in all aspects. Through the sprawling and deep love stories of Quichotte, Rushdie unveils the deteriorating postcolonial condition and posthumanist imaginations. The quest for a rather unrealistic love and an unflinching desire to believe in the power of love against all odds remain at the crux of the novel. But his work does not end there: he provides insights into the rotten state of contemporary times by remaining fully grounded in the past.
Not one to pull a punch, Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte, foregrounds the ideals of ubiquitous love and tolerance in a world that is consistently veering toward hatred, exclusion, and intolerance.Īgainst the backdrop of rising hostility among and within nations as well as individuals, Rushdie endeavors to find a fine balance between history and fiction through a reinterpretation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Salman Rushdie, the much-celebrated as well as vilified Indian-born British author of the novels Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, among others, has come up with a firecracker of a new novel.
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