The final portion is a wild ride: characters, narratives and worlds collide and come apart in spectacular fashion, while Rushdie maintains an exhilarating control over it all. Nonetheless, as it hurtles to its conclusion, the book does gather an enormous momentum. Quichotte is at its best when it deals in matters of the human heart, in fundamentals like love and death, rather than the self-satisfied satire of societal ills. There’s no need for Brother, or Rushdie, to spell it out. On page 356, for example, Brother explains what he wants to do in the book he’s writing: “The decay of the Earth in the novel would be a parallel to the decay – the environmental, political, social, moral decay – of the planet on which he lived.” Yes, great – but this parallel has of course been apparent for many of the previous 356 pages. But Sancho is soon on his own Pinocchio-style mission, determined to become a real boy – with the help a talking cricket named Jiminy (yes, really).Īnd while Rushdie may bring together the most astonishing array of button-pressing hot takes on contemporary culture, he never misses a chance to make sure the reader really, really gets it. To accompany him on his journey, the childless Quichotte invents Sancho, an imaginary son. Rushdie’s novel is a modern take on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and so Quichotte sets off on a quest to prove himself worthy of Salma’s love.

As a result, he believes he’s destined to be with a beautiful, Oprah-like talk show host named Salma R (yes, really), also from India but living in New York.

Quichotte is an Indian man of advancing years, living in America and working as a travelling pharmaceutical salesman: following a stroke, he’s lost his grip on reality and become addicted to reality TV. If that was an allegory for India’s independence and then partition, Quichotte goes as far as to align the death of the author with the end of the entire world. Salman Rushdie’s new novel – already longlisted for the Booker Prize – is a sprawling behemoth, feeling finally as big in scope as Midnight’s Children, which twice won the Best of Booker.

Rushdie quichotte review