I always find hard to review a literary book by a great writer because I don't know if I'll be able to find the right words.
This was an excellent read and I loved the style of writing and I think that Mr Rushdie is a master storyteller.
Everything is balanced and perfect and I loved it.
This novel is strongly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Quichotte: a jumbling metafiction

Having previously read Salman Rushdie’s other titles his signature personality runs through this book in just the same way, sometimes almost in an overpowering way.

As I first opened this text I really wanted to love everything about it, I felt honoured to be able to read it early and wanted to be able to write a glowing review. In some ways I appreciated Rushdie’s clever tropes that underpinned the whole novel, I found he demonstrated the illusion between reality and fantasy that our modern day selves can feel very satirically; the role reality TV plays in our disillusionment of the world around us and the ever-thinning veil between what’s real and what isn’t. Through Sam DuChamp and his partially-autobiographic character, Quichotte, Rushdie clearly put forward an imaginative tale about the effects of the modern day era on the relationship between memory and make-believe and brought to life an air of distrust between own inner selves and the characters. I felt like I could grasp this concept of the book and I got this. His playfulness with fact and fiction enters new realms of historical fiction and has you on an uncomfortable journey throughout.

Unfortunately, I still found that the confusing, packed and hectic first chapter didn’t catch my attention, but instead, left me feeling disconnected. A disconnection that I couldn’t shake throughout the rest of the novel. I don’t know if I’ve picked the wrong time to try and read this novel in terms of my own concentration, or if maybe I’ve grown unaccustomed to Rushdie’s style. Either way, I found myself unable to sympathise with any of the characters (real or fictional) and felt by a quarter of the way through I was being pulled on this journey. Unsure whether this confusion was a purposeful effect, aimed to drag the reader into the metafiction of Author Sam and his fictional Mr Smile, or if it was simply due to the not so subtle and, not always so strategic, placement of historical facts, Quichotte felt like it was trying to do too much at once. Rushdie felt like he had a lot to say with this novel, and some of this faltered the intelligence he shows the reader in his intricately intertwined character plots.

I plan on trying to come back to this novel at a later date when my own concentration levels are better in the hope I can shed a new light and gain a better understanding on just how I was meant to feel. Without a doubt, Rushdie is able to demonstrate something original and genre altering with this book and it is definitely one to be picking up and giving a read for yourself. I just can’t decide yet if he alters the role of the historical fiction novel for good or for bad with this particular novel.

If you’re a Salman Rushdie fan keep your eye out for the release of Quichotte in August and let me know what you think!

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is not my usual genre, I’m more into crime/thriller books and even psychological thrillers too so I am extremely pleased and grateful to them for opening up my mind to something totally different.

The central story clearly has its origins in Cervantes, as Rushdie tells the story of an expatriate indian, Quichotte, living in America as he embarks on a journey across the continent with his imaginary son in search of his beloved, who has the self referential name of Salma R. As Quichotte travels, his story is entwined with that of the author writing him. Through this device Rushdie explores the autobiographical elements of the writers craft as aspects of his real life are reflected in his hero's struggles. Indeed Rushdie himself occasionally appears in the novel's shadows. In the story of Quichotte, the author makes extensive use of metaphor and magical realism. I wasn't very happy as the story unfolded, the beggining was much better than the ending.

Sam DuChamp, author of spy novels still waiting for any to succeed, attempts to write the book that has never been written before and which centres around Ismail Smile, sales executive with Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc. When Smile discovers Salma R, a highly popular TV show host – surely some pun must be intended here -, he immediately falls for her and decides to make her fall in love with him, too. First, he writes letters, then, he goes on the long journey to New York, accompanied by his teenage son Sancho, whom he only imagines. Just like Cervantes’ Quichotte, he has a quest in front of him that he is willing to complete. Sam DuChamp also has to travel, however, not to find love but to find answers for questions concerning his very own family.

“Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional (...)”

In his 14th novel, Salman Rushdie is playing with fact and fiction within a fictional novel and cleverly demonstrates what we do in our so called real life to re-narrate reality, to shape it according to our needs and longings to make it take the form we would like it to have. Especially when it comes to the author’s family, we get a typical example of a family history which is told in a certain way and shaped by omission and half-truths, something that is all but unusual. Pop-culture in the form of TV has for many years created another variety of reality, everybody knows how easy it is to edit film material to get a certain message across and how easily nowadays pictures can be photoshoped to have somebody appear in a desired way. Fake news and alternative news have become a widely accepted accessory phenomenon of factual news, thus, our assumed reality is full of fiction and we are simply a part of it.

It is not just this intelligent and highly entertaining interplay between fact and fiction that makes the novel an outstanding read, it is also the masses of references to classic literature, pup culture, film, music, current issues like racism or the opioid crisis that turn the read into a roller coaster ride. His letter writing protagonist on his quest through seven valleys compulsorily seems to have fallen out of time completely - yet, that’s exactly what makes Salma R become interested in him.

Rushdie does not show the slightest respect for any limits of genre, his Quichotte is a road novel as well as a chivalric romance, popular literature and documentary of current America, philosophical essay and modern version of a great classic novel. He is most certainly known for finding literary ways of criticising the world around him in which he also succeeds with his latest novel. Apart from the plot, his witty and playful narrator adds to the humorous tone and earned him a well-deserved place on the shortlist of the 2019 Man Booker Prize.

This is the sort of novel I feel the need to reach for metaphor to describe, tired and cliched metaphors at that: it is a roller coaster, a kaleidoscope, a hall of mirrors, shifting sands…. It is dazzling – but being dazzled is not always the most comfortable experience!

Our protagonist appears – everything in this novel only appears to be anything! – to be Ismael Smile, a travelling salesman from India, on roads of Trump’s America. To be fair, Trump is not named once (bless the search function in electronic books) but the absurd and populist world created is far too recognisable. Ismael’s mind has become addled and detatched from reality as a result of too much day time television and

he fell victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct, so that at times he found himself incapable of distinguishing one from the other, reality from “reality,” and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen to which he was so devoted

The television screen, the liminal division between real and unreal, is probably the central image of the book, in a world where our politicians appear to be as informed by Twitter and Fox News as by the so-called intelligence services! And an image which has become increasingly permeable in the post-truth world: Ismael adopts the identity and knight-errant quest of Cervantes’ Don Quixote; dreamed-up imaginary children become embodied; television newscasters talk directly to and respond to their viewers.

And that permeability applies to the novel itself: we bounce between Ishmael / Quichotte’s quest for love and the story of Quichotte‘s putative author, Sam DuChamp, although the name disappears rapidly into the narrative in favour of the anonymous “Brother”.

The plot follows Quichotte’s quest for the love of Salma R – chatshow host and television star and fellow member of the Indian diaspora whom he has never met – and treads a fine line between the love being courtly and ennobling or stalking. Quichotte’s quest requires him to pass through seven symbolic valleys in order to prove himself worthy before even meeting her: valleys of Love, Knowledge and Annihilation amongst others. Along the way, he spawns a son, Sancho from his own imagination, willed into being and gaining corporeality, independence – and Jiminy Cricket from time to time as his own personal deus ex machina.

Brother, in his parallel existence, seeks to reconnect with his estranged son – apparently on the radar of the security services as a cyber terrorist – and sister Jack – who lives in London with her cross-dressing husband, Jack, and dying of cancer. In its characters and emotions, this aspect of the novel felt much deeper and more realistically portrayed, but no less playfully. I personally loved the agent who was almost definitely not called Lance Makioka, the real world spy sent to recruit (is that the right word) the spy novel author, who passes rather astute observations about the Quichotte novel:

“I’m no critic, sir, but I estimate that you’re telling the reader that the surreal, and even the absurd, now potentially offer the most accurate descriptors of real life. It’s an interesting message, though parts of it require considerable suspension of disbelief to grasp.

The novel is outrageously funny in places – darkly funny but funny nonetheless: it is self-referential, self-parodic, intertextually playful. The list of novels and works borrowed from would be exhausting: beyond the Cervantes, we riff on Alice in Wonderland, Moby-Dick, Pinocchio, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Nabokov’s Lolita; Candy Crush Saga, The Real Housewives …, Heidi Klum, Men in Black… It is a novel that identifies itself as belonging to

the picaresque tradition, its episodic nature, and how the episodes of such a work could encompass many manners, high and low, fabulist and commonplace, how it could be at once parodic and original, and so through its metamorphic roguery it could demonstrate and seek to encompass the multiplicity of human life.

And the post-truth world in which Quichotte and increasingly Brother operate are in

the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules anymore. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen.

And anything does happen: nationalist and far right men and women are seen with invisible collars, guns chat amiably to their wielders, sinister drug dealing pharmaceutical company owners can disappear in puffs of smoke, people can transform into mastodons, mastodons can start walking on two legs; and a world where racist violence can erupt from anywhere and the boundaries between real and unreal dissolve into an apocalyptic conclusion. And the saviour of humanity may be “the celebrated American scientist, entrepreneur, and billionaire of Indian origin Evel Cent”.

The question that bugs me here – as a personal reviewer is the key one, and the only one that truly counts: subjectively, did I enjoy the book?

And I did – in parts.

At its best, Rushdie’s prose is languid, clever and beautiful, his exploration of the world – worlds? – unsettling and original and often clever and funny. We do, surely, live in worlds and layers of fiction within our own minds and identities as much as if not more so than for others, lying and inventing ourselves for ourselves over and over again. As Brother says, on discovering his sister’s sexual abuse as she lies on her death bed

Not to be told the whole truth, as Sister with her legal expertise would know perfectly well, was to be told a lie. That lie had been his truth. Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn’t understand it wasn’t real.

This unsettling subjective reality feels to terribly real!

The word, however, that creeps into my mind as I review it is perhaps bloated. Is it perhaps a little self-indulgent? A little over long? A little bit too clever or too allusive? I fear perhaps just a little.

'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, unforgiveable things; about Indian immigrants, racism towards them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the interwining 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 addition, too, he added.'

Thus the fictional Author, also known as Brother, to Sister - and the dizzying parallels as this also sums up Rushdie's vast and meta fantasia of a novel. Only it doesn't explain why I loved this so much: it's not just that I adored the deep structural intertextuality but that, unlike 'The Golden House' which I also enjoyed immensely, there real heart here.

Ultimately, this is a book about love and reconciliation, about the healing of divisions and the possibility of forging a new future. Foolish? Maybe. But isn't that precisely the power of Quichotte - his foolish innocence and optimism?

Of course, this is also a text that is full of Rushdie's flamboyant, excessive, exuberance and inventiveness. It's not subtle (the mastodons - ha!) but it is more coherent than many of the reviews I've read claim. Fragmentation, the book asserts, is a (the?) post-modern condition: from the unfinished contingency of literary form to the breakdown of monolithic master-narratives, to the diasporas of so many communities, voluntary or not, and the more local and personal breaks within family relations. How could a book dealing in all these fractures be anything other than fractured itself?

Importantly, then, at moving moments Rushdie's book brings unity to the broken: an author creates a character who invents a son who then Jiminy Cricket turns into a 'real, live boy' (Pinocchio, in case you're scratching your head) but then the author himself is given back his own relationship with his estranged son. Brothers and sisters are reunited in a nod to, surely, 'Twelfth Night', name-checked earlier in the book.

In a series of dizzying moves, Rushdie zooms between reception theory, a sly Barthesian conclusion as the fictional author realises that his book knows more about him than he might expect, and all manner of meta tricks. But all that, for me, is merely the icing: the substance of the cake is far more grounded even as it is the stuff of dreams: 'it was the time of miracles, [...] their broken love remade. If that could be true then everything was possible. It was, as Quichotte reminded him, the Age of Anything-Can-Happen.'

Rushdie's Booker nominated tragi-comic Quichotte is a reinterpretation of the traditional classic Don Quixote for our chaotic, challenging and troubled contemporary realities, a satire with its political and social commentary. A mediocrity of a writer, Sam Duchamps/Brother, is the creator and author of Quichotte (Ismail Smile), who is a travelling salesman of Indian origin in the United States who gets fired. Quichotte, is a trash reality TV obsessive, so much so that his brain has turned to mush with the consequent mental health issues that arise. His deranged and delusional mind becomes focused on a beautiful TV hostess, the bi-polar, opiate addicted, Miss Salma R., with whom he falls in 'love'. Determined to prove that he is worthy of her hand, he embarks on a picaresque quest across America, conjuring a mutinous son, Sancho, as his companion.

In a strangely optimistic and hopeful narrative, with elements of magical realism, Rushdie turns out to be outrageously entertaining, with the kind of bonkers smarts to blend and inundate us with a huge array of high and low brow culture and literary references, so heavily laden and coming from seemingly every direction possible. He draws on numerous sources for the novel, such as classic 1950s science fiction, philosophy, myths and legends, to elucidate our messed up world of political populism, cult of celebrity and fame, rampant racism, migrant experiences, guns, opiate addiction social media, and more. In our sadly all too real world, where fact and fiction is virtually indistinguishable, the unrealistic adventures of Quichotte, where anything can happen and does, fits right into this melting pot of madness and unreality of the times that we live in.

Rushdie adroitly connects and merges Quichotte's story with that of Sam Duchamps in this fun, accessible, riveting and enjoyable tragi-comic read. Many thanks to Random House Vintage.

In 2002 Salman Rushdie as part of a group of 100 of the World’s best authors voted Cervantes “Don Quixote” as the greatest novel of all time.

In Guardian interview in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/26/salman-rushdie-the-books-that-changed-me) Rushdie revealed that he was re-reading the novel.

“I now find myself about halfway through the first book of Don Quixote, in the terrific Edith Grossman translation. This is proving to be a more complicated encounter. On the one hand, the characters of Quixote and Sancho Panza are as beautifully realised as I remember them, and the idea of a man determinedly seeing the world according to his own vision, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, feels strikingly contemporary. On the other hand, how many more times are the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and Sancho going to get beaten up and left in pain in various roadside ditches? The “greatest novel ever written” – I voted for it myself once – turns out to be just a little bit repetitive.”

And Don Quixote forms the obvious inspiration for this novel – a man who has read so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and is unable to distinguish the world they portray from reality, and a tale which starts, in perhaps the most famous line in Spanish literature “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember” is replaced by the opening

“There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origins, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who on account of his love for mindless television … has suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result”

After a very lengthy Rushdie-style list of examples of this mindless television (not exactly the only list to appear in the book) we are then told

“As a consequence of his near total preoccupation with the material offered up to him … he feel victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct ….. and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen”

And our link to the original is established with cable TV substituting for the chivalric romances. (together with a fairly unsubtle allusion – not the last – to current politics and Fake News)

Our character – Ismail Smile (Smile itself an Anglicization of Ismail) is a travelling salesman for the family owned Pharma conglomerate (Smile Pharma) which has recently made it big due to the development of an under the tongue method for delivering powerful opioids, as well as an aggressive sales approach towards incentivising doctors to take a rather relaxed approach to prescribing the drug for those not suffering from unbearable cancer related pain.

Ismail himself is estranged from his activist Sister – the Human Trampoline (https://genius.com/Paul-simon-graceland-lyrics) .

Ismail is obsessed with a Bollywood actress turned US television chat show star – Miss Salma R, and decides to set off on a quest to prove himself worthy of her love, not before renaming himself Quichotte after listening to his favourite recording – Jules Massanet’s “Don Quichotte” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quichotte) which he is told is “Only loosely based on the great Masterpiece of Cervantes … [Like] you’re a little loosely based yourself”.

Wiki lists a main change from the original as being that the “the simple farm girl Aldonza (Dulcinea) of the original novel becomes the more sophisticated Dulcinée, a flirtatious local beauty inspiring the infatuated old man's exploits” – which more fits the Miss Salma R character (whose background we learn more about in the third chapter – as well as learning of her present day addition to prescription drugs, an addiction which ends up drawing her to the Smile company).

Quichotte as an aside being pronouned key-SHOT (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=key%20shot) – another link to the abuse of drugs.

Just as Don Quixote took much more of a meta-fictional turn in its second part, so this book takes a metafictional turn in its second chapter – the first chapter we learn was written by Brother – an Indian now living in the US who writes Five Eyes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) based spy fiction under the pen name of Sam DuChamp.

Brother is alienated from his Sister (a prominent human rights lawyer in London – who we learn about starting in the fourth chapter including her near miss as speaker of the House of Lords, her cross-dressing High Court judge husband and her cancer) and his Son (who we later find is a hacker).

Quichotte himself in a later chapter imagines a son – Sancho – who quickly becomes more real (aided by an Italian cricket and blue fairy straight from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio_(1940_film)) and increasingly we and Brother realise that much of Quichotte’s life is a fictionalised reimagining of Brother’s life.

Other inspirations for the book, explicitly acknowledged by Rushdie at the end but which are worth, like I did, reading in advance are two classic science fiction short stories - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51193/51193-h/51193-h.htm - a story which is referenced perhaps a little too much in the novel, with simultaneously the novel’s summary rather spoiling the delight of the short story and the short story itself rather obviously telegraphing the novel’s end and https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html which is nicely appropriated for Quichotte’s quest (as his fictional universe only exists to sustain his quest).

Quichotte himself bases his quest around the Seven Valleys in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds and his increasingly surreal story includes a detour to the town of Berenger, not terribly subtly named after the protagonist of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_(play) - a play Rushdie had already referenced in ““Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” and which in this 1985 Granta article https://granta.com/on-gunter-grass/ Rushdie references (alongside “Tin Drum”, Tristram Shandy, Eisenstin, Borges, Ted Hughes Crow poems) as giving him “permission to be the sort of writer” he had “it in himself to be”.

And the lack of subtlety transfers to the events in Berenger as the town’s inhabitants revert to Mastadon status, and just to make sure we get the picture we are much later told

“maybe they said something about our growing dehumanization, about how as a species, we, or some of us, might be losing our moral compass and becoming, simultaneously, creatures out of a barbaric, pre-human, long-toothed past, and also monsters tormenting the human present.”

A final inspiration (not acknowledged) seems to be a science fiction series Rushdie was widely announced to be developing a few years ago – which seems to have gone nowhere – but which he said was a “kind of a parallel world story, in which it was our earth and another variation of it, and they somehow come into contact with each other” – Rushdie referred to the series in interviews on “Golden House” and mused it was “interesting preparatory work for the way [that] book turned out.”.

The influences here are clearer with another main character Evel Cent being a Elon Musk type visionary who suddenly announces that the world (Quichotte’s one) is being destroyed and that the only hope is a portal he is building allowing escape to a parallel earth, something Quichotte and his talking gun (yes really) seek to find.

The above is a vastly simplified version of the book’s crude topical commentary and its bizarre plot. It is also a vastly shortened version of the copious references to classic and popular culture it contains.

If at any stage during the book’s writing Rushdie felt he had taken any aspect (the lack of political subtlety, the surreal nature of the happenings, the randomness of the plot, the levels of allusion) to excess – then rather than drawing back and adding more foundations on which to build his often teetering edifice, Rushdie clearly chose to add yet another layer.

But for all its sprawling complexity it is also a book which is very explicit in what it is trying to achieve – and to make sure we are clear, Rushdie frequently literally putting words into his characters mouths to explain what is happening.

There is no question overall that this is a mess of a book. One that is inspired by rather elitist viewpoint, as well as drawing on tradition.

But traditional, elitist messes can, depending on your tastes, be extremely enjoyable, for example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_mess

And this book was to my literary taste.

I read Don Quixotte very recently, so I was able to understand how Rushdie was inspired from it to create a modern version of it.
As Don Quixotte is a huge satire of its times, Rushdie's Quichotte is a huge satire for our times criticising many aspects of our present days. He created a character to carry the story, as Quixotte was the one in the center in Cervantes' version.
The writing is really reminiscent of the original novel. It follows a similar style, and I found it very successful from that perspective. I think it'll be very subjective to find it funny or not for both novels. Rushdie's story also had fun parts and some dull moments in my opinion.
Regardless, in terms of what he wanted to achieve in creating a modern version of Don Quixotte, I found it impressive.
Thanks a lot to the publisher and NetGalley for this copy in exchange for this copy.