“Quichotte” has been shortlisted for the Booker prize
action of Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century picaresque “Don Quixote” to present-day America, Sir Salman Rushdie’s characteristically busy new book follows Sam, an Indian novelist who lives in New York. Sam draws on his own family strife to write the fantastical tale of a salesman, Ismail, out to woo Salma, an Indian-American talk-show host and “Oprah 2.0”.
A metafictional romp doubling as an oblique portrayal of the post-truth zeitgeist , “Quichotte” ought to be fun. Yet its teeming subplots fail to spark. Storylines about Salma’s secret opioid addiction, or a social-media storm that engulfs Sam’s estranged sister—a British politician accused of racism—seem to arise only from a desire to be topical.
“Quichotte” expends a great deal of energy going nowhere in particular. A reference to a character’s “kindliness” carries a footnote explaining that he is “by no means kindly in all matters. As we shall see. As we shall presently see.” Salma’s past goes unmentioned, “out of respect for her privacy”, before a backtrack: “the privacy rights of fictional characters are questionable—to be frank, they are nonexistent—and so we hereby abandon our modesty.
As the book’s real and invented worlds collide, there are affecting moments. Sancho falls for a woman to whom—being a figment of imagination—he is invisible. Sam creates a scene in which Ismail and Sancho witness a deadly racist attack, only for the incident to recur in Sam’s own life, forcing him and his son to intervene. But ultimately Sir Salman’s games feel more bloated than bountiful.
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