Quichotte

Reviews

“Rushdie weaves together all of his subjects, sharply observed, with extraordinary elegance and wit. . . . Cervantes’s hero, who is eternally modern perhaps because he is essentially anti-contemporary, couldn’t be a more inspired transplant into the mad reality of the present day, which Rushdie sends up in terms both universal and highly specific, tragic and hilarious, strange but hauntingly familiar. . . . At least here’s something worth reading as civilization crumbles around us, before we succumb to our fates. Right?”—Entertainment Weekly

“Quichotte is a novel that attempts to reflect back to us the total, crumbling insanity of living in a world unmoored from reality — that shows what happens when lies become as good as facts. . . . And if Quichotte drives you nuts, that’s fine. It’s meant to. It’s layered in such a way that you will lose yourself in the shifting reality of it.”—NPR

“Quichotte, Rushdie’s Trump-era reworking of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, is a frantically inventive take on ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’ we’ve endured these last few years. It’s a concoction of narratives within narratives that blends the latest news headlines with apocalyptic flights of fancy. . . . Rushdie doesn’t offer much hope for our dispiriting times. But in a frayed and feverish way, he captures their flavor exactly.”—The Boston Globe

“Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte is a behemoth of a novel, and with reason. A postmodern dystopian tale, it tackles everything from global warming to the rise of white supremacism to the opioid crisis—which is to say, most of the ills of contemporary society. . . . There’s much that feels absorbing and true in Rushdie’s latest work. . . . The way Rushdie handles racial animus, too, is as incisive and complex as in his earlier fiction.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“A fantastical dream within a dream . . . a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder . . . As [Rushdie] weaves the journeys of the two men nearer and nearer, sweeping up a full accounting of all the tragicomic horrors of modern American life in the process, these energies begin to collapse beautifully inward, like a dying star. His readers realize that they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of the world.”—Time

“[A] modern Don Quixote . . . Rushdie has created something that feels wholly original even if you’ve never heard of the hopelessly romantic Spanish knight-errant who sees danger in windmills. . . . Lucky for us, there are true storytellers and Rushdie is near the top of that list. If you haven’t read him before, this is a good book to start with—it’s fabulist and funny while revealing an awful lot about the world we live in today.”—Associated Press

“Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted fourteenth novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination. . . . You can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse.”—The Guardian

“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

“Rushdie’s novel is many things beyond just a Don Quixote retelling. It’s a satire on our contemporary fake-news, post-truth, Trumpian cultural moment, where the concept of reality itself is coming apart. It’s a sci-fi novel, a spy novel, a road trip novel, a work of magical realism. It’s a climate change parable, and an immigrant story in an era of anti-immigration feeling. It’s a love story that turns into a family drama. . . . Characters, narratives and worlds collide and come apart in spectacular fashion, while Rushdie maintains an exhilarating control over it all.”—The Independent Expand reviews