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Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte, is a Cervantes adaptation for the Trump and Brexit age. The novel is a pastiche quest story that plays out within a road movie universe populated by pop culture references. The novel’s protagonist is Quichotte, a TV-obsessed traveling pharmaceutical salesman, who in his advanced age has become convinced he must profess his love to a talkshow hostess, Salma R. Quichotte, and the son whom he has conjured from his memories, Sancho, travel across the country on a noble quest to Manhattan in pursuit of Miss Salma R. Salma R is an Indian mega-star actress, who struggles to make peace with the traumas she inherited from her female ancestors which mostly center around the personal costs of fame and living in the public eye. Her opioid abuse threatens to derail her career, and destroys her ability to form meaningful relationships with those around her.
The novel has a further meta dimension, as the quest narrative is actually a novel being written by an aging mystery novelist, called Brother, whose life interacts with his narrative in a number of revealing ways. Both Brother and Quichotte are immigrants from a small community in Bombay, both have fractured relationships with their family, and Quichotte’s conjured son stands in the place of the real son that Brother is estranged from. Both men are lost in the world, often untethered from reality, and struggle to carve out a space for themselves in a fractured American landscape.
Quichotte picks up the themes of immigration, displacement, and belonging that have been ever-present in Rushdie’s body of work. The novel updates many of these concerns for an age in which identities have become fragmented by the culture’s internet obsession, the rise of populism, and the blurring of the boundary between truth and mistruth. The novel also relies on a large amount of recent pop culture references, television franchises, science fiction texts, and social media platforms. Rushdie resists the boundaries of time and place, as the novel is both decidedly of its time and reliant upon storytelling conventions of centuries long past. While these larger societal concerns serve as framing devices, the novel is most strongly grounded in its interpersonal relationships. The father-son and brother-sister relationships are vehicles for Rushdie’s most affecting contemplations of human nature, inherited trauma, and the fragile makeup of familial bonds.
Some of the novel’s thematic elements can get lost amid the sea of intertextual references and the meandering structure of the narrative, but this feels intentional. In an age where confusion and chaos have become the norm, Rushdie’s flamboyant and crowded novel mirrors the chaos that characterizes our cultural consciousness. Rushdie’s sensibilities as an immigrant and a public persona greatly inform his exploration of the pressures placed on those who occupy those identities, and thus it is difficult to divorce his career as a novelist and his personal backstory from the themes that swirl about in Quichotte. Rushdie is of course aware of this fact, commenting within the novel on the nature of authorship and creation, and how an author interacts with their subject.
As Quichotte and Brother’s stories coalesce, the reader cannot ignore Rushdie as the mediator between the two, and one must suspect that the three figures share at least a portion of their personal histories. It is quite hard to characterize this novel, but it feels like one of the most daring and unique entries into the modern canon in a long time. It is at times incisive, and at other times philandering, but it feels very much propelled by Rushdie’s singular linguistic sensibilities, and sensitivity to the obstacles standing in the way of identity formation, especially for oppressed communities.