"Quichotte" by Salman Rushdie is a dazzling and inventive novel that takes readers on a modern-day quest inspired by Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote." Rushdie's narrative is a kaleidoscope of genres, blending humor, romance, and social commentary. The novel's intricate layers and metafictional elements create a rich and immersive reading experience.

While some readers may find the novel's complexity and intertextuality challenging, those who enjoy literary puzzles and a playfully inventive narrative will appreciate Rushdie's masterful storytelling. "Quichotte" stands as a testament to Rushdie's ability to craft a thought-provoking and imaginative work that both pays homage to classic literature and reflects on the complexities of the contemporary world.

I've started reading this several times, but I just couldn't get into it. It may be that it's just not the right book for me, or the right time for me to read it. I found it too slow, too detailed and not holding my interest. Maybe I'll return to but I'm really not sure. Each time I put it down I lacked any incentive to get back to it. Sorry.

Thank you to the publisher for my eARC copy of this book. Unfortunately I didn’t love this book and therefore didn’t finish, I just didn’t connect with this one. Not for me, sorry.

The latest novel from Salman Rushdie is a wonderful re-imagining of Cervantes' Don Quixote story for the modern era. Quichotte is full of humour, adventure and stuffed with literary references that add to an indulgent reading experience.

In our chaotic world where we struggle to agree on facts and with a woke culture affecting our politics, society, racism, cult of personality, and fame, Rushdie finds entertainment that is vivid and close to home.

I would highly recommend reading this book, and I want to thank Random House UK and NetGalley for providing me with a free ARC in return for an honest review.

Have you read Cervantes Don Quixote? I haven’t, but I know enough about the story to understand this modern version. Have you read Pinocchio? Once again, if you haven't, you know enough of the story to understand the references. And now, mix these two stories together, add a bit of known science fiction stories, some Bollywood, heaps of modern politics, inclination, mind blindness, readiness for catastrophe and class/racial conflicts, dose it all with back humor, remove rose colored glasses, add satire and you have this story about two men - author and Quichotte - who both are on a quest, just author writes Quichotte’s quest and Author writhes their both stories. Besides the satirical view to politics there is also a soul-stirring view about family, about sibling’s relationships and parent-descendent relationships.

It’s something different and thought provoking.

It has been many years since I read Don Quixote and this latest book from Salman Rushdie was a very clever and entertaining way of revisiting the old classic for modern times. Recommended.

I know this is a well-written and clever novel and that it's packed with great prose, but sadly it was not for me. I'm not sure if it's me that's the failure, or the book, but despite several attempts to immerse myself in it I just couldn't get emotionally involved. It's not a book you can escape into, you are always aware of its artifice and I'm afraid it just left me cold.
Perhaps it's something I'll return to but I'm really not sure.
With thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a free copy in return for an honest review.

Quichotte is Rushdie's modern day take on Cervantes' classic Don Quixote, a complicated tale of stories within stories. I honestly didn't think anyone would be able to pull this off, but somehow Rushdie has managed it. The meta-fictional layer is delivered with real panache and left me thinking and questioning long after I put the book down. Rushdie has somehow made this retelling both faithful to the original work, and yet something else all of its own.

I suspect this book (just like the original) won't be for everyone, but I personally loved it.

“Qichotte” is very much a post-modern story within a story of a novel written with all the energy and brio that we have come to expect of Salman Rushdie. The central story is, of course a re-telling of Miguel de Cervantes’ fantastical, satirical, and farcical seventeenth century novel “Don Quixote”.

Quichotte’s real name is Ismail Smile. He is an Indian American pharmaceutical salesman who has, for many years, spent his lonely life travelling across the United States from motel to motel. Long years spent in motel rooms watching junk American television programming appears to have finally addled his brain. Smile falls in love with Salma, an Oprah style TV show host that he has never met, and he begins to send her a series of love letters under the nom de plume “Quichotte”.

Smile’s mental state does not allow him to consider the possibility that the lovely Salma will not, when reading his letters, fall for him. This, in spite of the fact that she is a young and beautiful daytime TV hostess, and he is an ageing, balding, poor, rootless, and slightly mentally unbalanced by a stroke, man. So, he sets off to find her and in doing so encounters the America of today with its barely supressed violence, resentments, populism, and racism.

On his journey many fantastical happenings occur, not least men turning into Mastodons and his own yearning for a son resulting in the son of his imagination becoming real and, as all children do, planning to leave his father behind.

Wrapped around this inner story is that of the “author” where we learn that Ismail Smile’s story is the work in progress of an Indian-born spy novelist whose popularity is fading and who, as he ages, is troubled by the estrangement of his son and his sister, the latter presently dying of cancer in London.

Rushdie litters his narrative with a myriad reference to culture both high and low. Personally, I recognised a lot of them, some of them went over my head and I dare say there were some that I did not even notice. The sheer weight of these makes this novel an engaging and humorous read that gains ever more momentum the further you read into it. This is a dazzling novel that serves as a satire on our globalised, post-truth, disintegrating Trumpian world of today as it rushes headlong towards environmental, political, social, and moral disaster.

A philosophical and adventurous recast of Cervantes - extremely well written (what do you expect from Rushdie?), but overall was little underwhelming. The comments on the cult of celebrity, escapism and obsession were relevant, but did not really develop or enhance current discussions.

This is a book that readers are either going to love or hate, start or finish, applaud or abuse. You can finish up thinking you’ve been on a fabulous mad ride or you’ve just wasted several days of your life. If you already have any opinion about Salman Rushdie, the man and the writer, this will confirm your preconceptions!

Let’s start with what’s not to like! First of all, this is a multilayered story so you never quite know who is in control of it. It seems to be about a travelling salesman who takes the name Quichotte but then you find out that he is the creation of a second-rate crime novel author called Sam Duchamp. Quichotte, somehow, is blessed with a son in the narrative who simply arrives out of nowhere and who, like any good character, becomes increasingly real – or does he? Then, you have to cope with a meaningless road trip across the USA and just when you think this is a real story you come to a town which is full of dinosaurs. Like his antecedent, Quichotte has to be on a quest and here it is to find his true love, the TV talk show host Salma R, while watching a lot of bad television on the way with umpteen sideways cultural references which could really get up your nose!

As if that wasn’t enough, someone is bound to tell you this is a complex and multilayered story about the creative writing process, a revelatory swansong about Salman Rushdie’s late life preoccupations, a stunning critique of right-wing America, an exploration of opioid addiction and, yes, surely a Booker prizewinner!

As ever, the truth lies somewhere in between but this is an absorbing hommage to Cervantes and his character and as the story bowls along it is always entertaining and, sometimes, richly funny and satirical. A key theme is the relationship between fathers and sons and, just to add depth, the fictional world overlaps and winds around the less fictional world, but of course still fictional, of Duchamp. You are always aware there is still a prime mover somewhere behind the story as the edges of reality are constantly blurred against a background where the world is entering an entropic collapsing state. Of course, that means there has to be a mad scientist working to save the world so one of them pops up as well. The trick is to make events look completely randomised while actually maintaining a tight authorial hold which locks everything together.

Should you read it? Well, if you liked Midnight’s Children and are hoping for something similar then probably not but if your idea of fun is to drift around some exotic foreign market at night sniffing the air, drawing in mysterious and tantalising perfumes and letting yourself get lost in the colour, noise and excitement then you might really enjoy this journey. I certainly did.

“Quichotte” is Rushdie’s modern day version of Cervantes' "Don Quixote" down to the t; the meta-fictional layer works, it questions whether we write our own stories or our stories write us and examines what happens when the stories we tell ourselves become both our mental and physical reality.

An infinitely complicated book of stories within stories, a book as much about the author and his writing as about the characters and plot lines found inside. The book reads like a clever puzzle, it reminded me of a wooden puzzle box with infinite multiple layers to unravel. Definitely a writer's book, as readable as Rushdie gets and as blindingly clever as you'll find.

This book is fun. And that was my only real hope going into Quichotte. I read Don Quixote for the first time last year and it was one of the most fun, intelligent, multi-layered, glorious pieces of fiction I have ever had the pleasure of submersing myself in. Now, to be clear, I did not expect Salman Rushdie to match Cervantes masterwork, hence my only expectation was the book to be fun. After just finishing Quichotte, I can safely say Rushdie has pulled it off. He has written a deep, absurd, intelligent, sprawling meta-fiction and the style Rushdie has written in is intentionally comic in nature (I was reminded of the narrator in Tristram Shandy of all things). The story of Don Quixote has been expertly transposed to the modern world and I was constantly enamoured and left laughing uncomfortably at the characters of Quichotte and Brother. Rushdie also suffuses his novel with biting social commentary that was integrated in a meaningful way, as oppose to simply paying lip-service. The aspect I enjoyed the most about Quichotte would have to be the meta-fictional elements. In Don Quixote this is where I enjoyed myself the most as well so I was very happy that Rushdie has managed to do the same here. This has quickly become one of my favourite Salman Rushdie books to date. It is definitley a novel worthy of a re-read and a re-re-read and a re-re-re-read.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie is a glorious crazy novel within a novel, covering so many themes that it’s difficult to review accurately, The Impossible Dream went round my head for the whole book and I still find myself whistling snatches of the tune even after finishing the book. So what’s it about? The author in the book describes the plot to his sister as follows:

“He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father–son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and ‘real’ realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche. Nothing very ambitious, then, she said. And it’s about opioid addiction, too, he added.”

Certainly ambitious, but Rushdie pulls it off.

I also borrowed the audiobook version from my local library and thoroughly enjoyed listening to Vikas Adam’s narration, switching back and forth between reading and listening.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

I absolutely loved Rushdie's 'The Golden House', so was looking forward to reading this new one. How disappointed I was. So much so that I only read about 50 pages, couldn't read any further. Hence the low rating. Sorry.

A Don Quixote for the modern age, I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to adequately discuss how I felt about this book, did I enjoy it, yes would I recommend reading it yes. Salman Rushdie is a master of an author and this book is another masterpiece by him not to be missed.

You have to know and like Salman Rushdie’s writing to enjoy Quichotte. To read it is to place yourself into Rushdie’s metafictional flow state, and to stay there amidst the Quixotic goings-on without thinking you’re losing your mind. ‘Anything-Can-Happen’ is, indeed, the telling phrase here. As a quest narrative satirising, as Cervantes did, time and culture, Rushdie takes the protagonist of his protagonist – and his readers – on a bizarre journey across America, parodying the ridiculous nature of love and life today. And this is a novel about writing, too. Sam DuChamp creates a character, Quichotte, and the two of them (and possibly, even the three of them if you include Rushdie himself) often meld into one to create a mind-bending but truly brilliant portrayal of humanity, the need and quest for love and morality. Recommended, but not if you’ve never read Rushdie before.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie is a razor-sharp, multi-layered adventure addressing a good range of burning contemporary societal issues, complex family relationships, as well as the author's special and uncertain relationship with the characters he has created.

On the surface, the principle character Quichotte is obsessed with TV culture and has made his goal winning the affections of an unobtainable TV personality, Salma R. However, before meeting Salma R, Quichotte has to deal with a number of demons which are linked and reflected in the author Brother’s own personal life.

Rushdie never misses a trick, cleverly creating characters that we immediately recognize, and plays with them in ways that delight the reader.

My thanks to Random House U.K. Jonathan Cape for a digital edition via NetGalley of ‘Quichotte’ by Salman Rushdie in exchange for an honest review. It was originally published in September 2019 and was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction. Its paperback edition is due to be published on 23 July 2020.

I will admit that this is the first novel by Rushdie that I have read as I have been rather intimidated by his reputation. ‘Quichotte’ proved a surprise as it proved extremely accessible.

This is a novel within a novel and an homage to the classic, Don Quixote’ by Cervantes. Here Sam DuChamp, a mediocre writer of spy thrillers, changes track and creates Quichotte, a courtly salesman obsessed with television. He falls in love with television star, Miss Salma R. and with his imaginary son, Sancho, sets off on a quest across America to prove himself worthy of her hand.

His creator, who is experiencing a midlife crises, faces challenges of his own. The lives of DuChamp and Quichotte increasingly interweave and as this is a work rich in magical realism things become wonderfully strange.

‘The Guardian’ review described ‘Quichotte’ as “a literary hall of mirrors” given its story within a story narrative and I felt that was an excellent analogy. It was quite playful and funny in places yet philosophical while commenting on the absurdity of aspects of modern life.

Having read and enjoyed it very much, I now feel more confident about reading more of his work.

Highly recommended.