Random House Trade
Quichotte
Couldn't load pickup availability
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, "a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder" (Time) from internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE - "Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming . . . a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium--a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language."--Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND NPR
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 a TV star. 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 Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie's work, the fully realized 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.
Praise for Quichotte
"Brilliant . . . a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement."--Financial Times
"Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism. . . . The narration is fleet of foot, always one step ahead of the reader--somewhere between a pinball machine and a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders. . . . This novel can fly, it can float, it's anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot."--The Sunday Times
"Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes's story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump's America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys. . . . This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind."--The Times (UK)
Share
Book Details
ISBN:
9780593133002
EAN:
9780593133002
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
416
Authors:
Salman Rushdie
Publisher:
Random House Trade
Published Date: 2020-26-05
View full details
Author knew plot of original and was creative enough to incorporate details into this book.
Mr. Rushdie's novel is one of the best. Inspired by Cervantes' Don Quixote this novel has a title character with mind diminished by 'reality TV'. This is used to examine America's junk culture, and its' effect on the entire world. Witty, entertaining, and cautionary.
He has his finger on time and place. Totally captures the imagination. Not a book to be read by all but should be.What a trip. It reads like an emotional landscape.
Mr. Ismail Smile, an elderly Indian pharmaceutical rep, fired from his job and deranged by too many nights in a Motel 6, decides to pursue and marry the glamorous TV personality, Miss Salma R. He adopts the name Quichotte, from the French name of the Don, but also from "Key-Shot", a single dose of fentanyl. His faithful steed is an aging Chevy Cruze and his companion is an imaginary son with whom he has long philosophical conversations. Then there's Evil Scent, a genius at rockets and electric cars, who argues that we must immediately migrate, not to another planet, but to a parallel universe which may not actually exist. And to wrap it up, the whole crazy tale seems to exist only in the mind of a burned out writer trying to make a few bucks.It's a wild ride, Cervantes by way of Philip K. Dick.
A wonderful story, or levels of story, by one of the great wordsmiths for our times. A bit of Pinocchio, current events, Cormack McCarthy, and Cervantes in a nested search for self and the beloved. Rushdie's own life is greater than fiction, and it takes a certain grace and courage to make such a public pilgrimage through the inevitability of self. He reminds me here of a slightly less frenetic, and slightly more worldly, Tom Robbins. And much of this story seems reminiscent of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
