Quichotte: A Novel

by Salman Rushdie

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

Quichotte is a love story of profound tenderness and humanity from a great storyteller at his brilliant best. Wise, beautifully written, as heartbreaking as it is wildly comic, its characters unforgettable, its plot dazzlingly suspenseful, it illuminates our corrupt times where fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Quichotte, an aging travelling salesman obsessed with TV, is on a quest for love. Unfortunately, his daily diet of reality TV, sitcoms, films and soaps has distorted his ability to separate fantasy from reality. He wishes an imaginary son, Sancho, into existence, while obsessively writing love letters to a celebrity he knows only through his screen. Together the two innocents set off across America in Quichotte's trusty Chevy Cruze to find her and convince her of his love.
     Quichotte's story is told by Sam DuChamp, a mediocre spy novelist in the midst of a midlife crisis, and as the stories of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine, we are taken on a wild, picaresque journey through a familiar country on the edge of moral and spiritual collapse.

• ISBN10: 0735279314
• ISBN13: 9780735279315
• Publish Date: 3 September 2019 (first published 20 August 2019)
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Publish Country: CA
• Imprint: Knopf Canada
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 416
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

When I set out on my quest to read the entire 2019 Booker shortlist, this is one that I was not particularly looking forward to. But a highly skilled synthesis and detailed satirical exploration of modern American society won me over, in the end. There's a lot to pull out here: the insistent denial of real or proper names, the meta recognition of the author as self-insert (Quichotte has the same birthday as Rushdie, which I know because it's also my birthday), the rather searing depiction of Big Pharma's complicity in the opioid epidemic, the thorough exploration of the ways in which racism informs the American (and British) experience... there was a lot here. Rushdie seems to insist that the heart of American culture is rotten, a sentiment that will surely ruffle some patriotic feathers. At less than four hundred pages, it takes true writing talent to work through all of these big ideas in a satisfying, thorough way, but I do feel that Rushdie achieved that. Is the book a little bit smug and self-impressed at times? Yes, but it's still a good read.