Introduction

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 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 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.

Praise for Quichotte

“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

“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)

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of September 2019: Quichotte is Salman Rushdie at his best. An exquisite satire on the world we live in, Rushdie’s latest novel pays Cervantes a great, clever compliment with this deliciously funny Don Quixote for modern times. Quichotte is a story within a story, a fictional novelist unraveling his own journey of love and family through writing the story of a man (whom the novelist names Quichotte) not wholly unlike himself. Quichotte is a simple man who has watched too much television and now believes we are living in a world of “Anything-Can-Happen,” when even an aged pharmaceutical salesman can win the love of a beautiful TV star whom he has never met. And so Quichotte’s quest begins. Quichotte creates a son for himself, Sancho, sprung wholly formed to sit beside him in his reliable Chevy Cruze on this cross-country adventure and with whom he might share his vision of the world. Unfortunately, this familial bond does not turn out the way Quichotte imagined. The fictional novelist finds himself in the same situation, discovering that the truths he’s told himself about his relationships and family have been wrong all along. A road trip across America in an age that would be utterly surreal if we weren’t actually living it, Quichotte is an antidote to fear, a novel bursting with intelligence and wit—and exactly what so many of us need right now. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review

Excerpt

No Excerpt Currently Available

Discussion Questions

Suggested by Members

by [email protected] (see profile) 09/27/19

Weblinks

There are no web links at this time.

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book