PVLF 2025

Quichotte A NOVEL : by SALMAN RUSHDIE

Quichotte A NOVEL : by SALMAN RUSHDIE
on Aug 27, 2019

ABOUT QUICHOTTE

A dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age—an epic tour de force that is as much an homage to an immortal work of literature as it is to the quest for love and family, by Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 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.

Advance praise for Quichotte

“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)“A brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder.”—Time

PRAISE

“This latest from Rushdie is nothing but extraordinary. . . . This incisively outlandish but lyrical meditation on intolerance, TV addiction, and the opioid crisis operates on multiple planes, with razor-sharp topicality and humor, delivering a reflective examination of the plight of marginalized personhood with veritable aplomb.”—Library Journal “Hilarious by all accounts.”—Literary Hub “[Quichotte] is Don Quixote for our time, a smart satire of every aspect of the contemporary culture. Witty, profound, tender, this love story shows a fiction master at his brilliant best.”—The Millions “A meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization . . . Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form.”—Kirkus Reviews “Allowing the wild adventure to overwhelm oneself is half the fun. Rushdie’s extravagant fiction is the lie that tells the truth. . . . A brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times.”—Publishers Weekly “An exuberantly imagined and lacerating homage to the revered satire Don Quixote. . . . This spellbinding, many-limbed saga of lives derailing in the ‘Age of Anything-Can-Happen’ is a wily frolic and a seismic denunciation. Rushdie meshes shrewd, parodic humor with intensifying suspense and pervasive sympathy, seeding this picaresque doomsday adventure with literary and television allusions and philosophical musings. As his vivid, passionate, and imperiled characters are confronted with racism, sexism, displacement, family ruptures, opioid addiction, disease, cyber warfare, and planetary convulsions, they valiantly seek the transcendence of love. . . . Rushdie’s dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials.”—Booklist