Still, even if you feel overwhelmed, you can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world ends. While Quichotte is funny, it’s rarely as funny as Rushdie thinks it is. It was colour after a lifetime of black-and-white, Monroe after Mansfield, Margaux after Hobnob, Cervantes after Avellaneda, Hammett after Spillane…”
When Salma tries an opioid spray for the first time, it’s like “graduating to a Rolls-Royce after years spent behind a Nissan Qashqai. Quichotte ends up suffering from a kind of internetitis, Rushdie swollen with the junk culture he intended to critique.Īt times, he sounds like your dad reciting hip-hop: “We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks… We’re America, bitch.” More often, his references feel dated. The novelist’s natural bent has always been towards the encyclopedic, but now he has graduated from encyclopedia to Google. The prose is dense with cultural allusions, too: Candy Crush Saga, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the model Heidi Klum, Men in Black, etc. We end up in a literary hall of mirrors, as he flirts with every genre he’s ever clapped eyes on, paying dues to Alice in Wonderland, Moby-Dick, Pinocchio, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Nabokov’s Lolita. Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted 14th novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination. But here, Quichotte must adjust to a post-truth world, where “visions and other phantasmagoria are to be expected”. One of the tropes of the realist novel is the clash between illusions and reality – the individual who must adjust their ideals in order to live in the real world.
Broken times they may be, but as India, America and Britain lurch to the right, their fates appear conjoined in a globalised world.ĭon Quixote is often credited as the first realist novel in western literature. Rushdie argues that such broken migrant families are the “best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth”.
The Author is tormented by his estrangement from his son and his lawyer sister, “Jack”, who is dying of cancer in London. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world endsīut their quest is soon revealed as a story within a story, written by an Indian-born spy novelist as a late-in-life attempt at experimental fiction. On their travels, Quichotte and Sancho duly encounter racists, opioids, humans who turn into mastodons, crickets who speak Italian and guns that talk. But even the most unlikely romance seems possible in the “Age-of-Anything-Can-Happen”. Just as Cervantes’s hidalgo lost his mind after reading too many romances, so Quichotte has had his brain addled by trash TV.
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