Quichotte
Ratings9
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings9
Average rating3.8
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*** 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 Quixotefor 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 the TV star Salman R. 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 Quixoteto 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, 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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As I just finished Don Quixote, I had to read this book. I've only read two other books by Rushdie: his children's books Haroun and the Sea of Stories (loved) and Luka and the Fire of Life (hated). Although I enjoyed some parts of Quichotte, on the whole it did not come together for me. Rushdie's writing was a mishmash of cliches, quotations, and derivative elements, meant no doubt as parody and homage, but lacking a distinctive “music” of its own. The dissolution of the world of the novel in the end paralleled the dissolution of any caring I had developed for the characters, as the whole scenario just became sillier and more bizarre. Maybe that was the point, but it left me feeling cheated rather than exhilarated.
Along the way I thought often of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, who have played similar kinds of games with words, language, and literature, but have done it so much better. Either of them would be more deserving of the Booker Prize, in my opinion.
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