48
The Observer
25.08.19 BooksSalman Rushdie:
‘the best novelist
of his generation
at writing
women’. Joel
Saget/AFP/GettyNo, it’s not a type of canape. It’s
Quichotte as in Don Quixote , Miguel
de Cervantes ’s 17th-century proto-
novel, here reimagined by Salman
Rushdie as a 21st-century post-
novel. Realism, apparently, is no
longer up to the job of describing
our nutzoid world. As one character
suggests, “the surreal, or even the
absurd, now offer the most accurate
descriptors of real life”.
We’re not in La Mancha any
more but Trumpland. Our knight
errant is a dapper old duffer named
Ismail Smile who loses his job as a
pharmaceutical salesman and sets
off across America with a teenage
son he has dreamed up named
Sancho. Ismail hopes to win the
heart of a young TV star named
Salma , a fellow Indian-American,
whose chatshow has made her
“Oprah 2.0”. He has never met her
but he sends love letters under the
pen name “Quichotte”, believing
“love will fi nd a way” of bringing
them together.
Just as Cervantes’s hidalgo lost
his mind after reading too many
romances, so Quichotte has had
his brain addled by trash TV. But
even the most unlikely romance
seems possible in the “Age-of-
Anything-Can-Happen”. On their
travels, Quichotte and Sancho duly
The modern-day master of allusion
encounter racists, opioids, humans
who turn into mastodons, crickets
who speak Italian and guns that talk.
But their quest is soon revealed
as a story within a story, written by
an Indian-born spy novelist as a
late-in-life attempt at experimental
fi ction. The Author is tormented
by his estrangement from his son
and his lawyer sister, “Jack”, who is
dying of cancer in London. Rushdie
argues that such broken migrantIt’s like the work of a
man trying to have
the fi nal word on
everything before
the world ends
Fiction
Junk culture references
abound in Salman
Rushdie’s frisky rewrite
of Don Quixote, writes
Johanna Thomas-Corr
Wolfgang , the man who ran him
over. “His wing mirror, from which
he had glimpsed the man in pieces
crossing the road, had shattered.
A thousand and one slivers of glass
were fl oating inside my head.”
A Man in Pieces is the title of
one of Jennifer’s photographs
from the early exhibition that
made her famous: a naked portrait
of Saul, but fragmented into its
individual components. In Levy’s
impressionistic prose, Jennifer
always feels just out of reach as
a character, but her purpose in the
novel is clear: “Jennifer was making
a career from looking. At me.” As
the title ironically implies, this is
a book about seeing and being seen;
about who does the looking and
how our gaze is always selective.Eyes and lenses are recurring
motifs. In Jennifer, Levy reverses
the traditional idea of the male
gaze and the artist’s muse, echoing
her interest in Medusa in The Cost
of Living – a female fi gure whose
regard, when turned on men, is both
powerful and dangerous.
“It was true that I had no idea
how to endure being alive and
everything that comes with it,”
Saul refl ects. “Responsibility. Love.
Death. Sex. Loneliness. History.”
Levy handles her weighty themes in
this slim novel with a lightness of
touch and a painfully sharp sense of
what it means to look back on a life
and construct a coherent whole
from its fragments. The Man Who
Saw Everything has already been
longlisted for the Booker prize;
a third shortlisting for Levy would
be well deserved. Stephanie MerrittTo order The Man Who Saw Everything
for £11.49 go to guardianbookshop.
com or call 0330 333 6846Who said lightning
doesn’t strike twice?
blurring of past and present takes
on a more literal, urgent reality.
In 1988, aged 28, Saul is hit by a
car on the famous Abbey Road zebra
crossing in London. Or is he? In the
immediate aftermath of the accident
Saul, a student of eastern European
communist history, breaks up with
his photographer girlfriend, Jennifer ,
moves to East Berlin , falls in love
with his host, Walter , who is a Stasi
informer, sleeps with Walter’s sister
and ends up possibly betraying them
both, accidentally, to the authorities.
But Saul’s account becomes
increasingly unreliable; he
whispers intimate confi dences to
Walter about events yet to happen,
including the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the reunifi cation of Germany.The Man Who Saw Everything
Deborah Levy
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 , pp 208
Fiction
Images, faces and incidents recur as
motifs in both London and Berlin,
unsettlingly out of context.
Halfway through the novel, Saul
is hit by a car on the Abbey Road
crossing in 2016, at the age of 56.
This time, the damage is serious; he
wakes in hospital, drifting in and
out of morphine dreams. Jennifer,
now a celebrated artist, is by his
side; so is his father, whose ashes
Deborah Levy has won critical Saul buried in the GDR in 1988, and
acclaim in recent years for her
two slim volumes of “living
autobiographies”, Things I Don’t
Want to Know and The Cost of Living ,
both unsparing interrogations of her
experience in the context of broader
literary, feminist and political
history. One review of The Cost of
Living described Levy’s internal
world as “ a shape-shifting space
where past and present coexist ”.
The description would also serve
perfectly for Saul Adler , the narrator
of Levy’s seventh novel , The Man
Who Saw Everything. For Saul, the
families are the “best mirrors of our
times, shining shards that refl ect
the truth”. Broken times they may
be, but as India, America and Britain
lurch to the right, their fates appear
conjoined in a globalised world.
Don Quixote is often credited as
the fi rst realist novel in western
literature. One of the tropes of the
realist novel is the clash between
illusions and reality – the individual
who must adjust their ideals in
order to live in the real world. But
here, Quichotte must adjust to a
post-truth world, where “visions
and other phantasmagoria are to
be expected”.
Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted
14th novel is certainly the work of
a frisky imagination. We end up
in a literary hall of mirrors, as he
fl irts with every genre he’s ever
clapped eyes on, paying dues to
Alice in Wonderland, Moby-Dick,
Pinocchio , Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and
Nabokov’s Lolita. The prose is dense
with cultural allusions, too: Candy
Crush Saga , The Real Housewives of
Atlanta , the model Heidi Klum , Men
in Black, etc. The novelist’s natural
bent has always been towards
the encyclop edic, but now he has
graduated from encyclop edia to
Google. Quichotte ends up suffering
from a kind of internetitis, Rushdie
swollen with the junk culture he
intended to critique.
At times, he sounds like your dad
reciting hip-hop: “We don’t needDeborah Levy’s Booker-longlisted
seventh novel raises questions
of seeing.Quichotte
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, £20, pp416
no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid
and you can suck our dicks... We’re
America, bitch.” More often, his
references feel dated. When Salma
tries an opioid spray for the fi rst
time, it’s like “graduating to a Rolls-
Royce after years spent behind a
Nissan Qashqai. It was colour after a
lifetime of black-and-white, Monroe
after Mansfi eld, Margaux after
Hobnob, Cervantes after Avellaneda,
Hammett after Spillane...”
While Quichotte is funny, it’s rarely
as funny as Rushdie thinks it is.
Sometimes, it reads like the work of
a man trying to have the fi nal word
on everything before the world ends.
Or at least before he ends. Still, even
if you feel overwhelmed, you can’t
help being charmed by Rushdie’s
largesse. Let’s not get into whether
the four-times divorced novelist who
drooled over various “hot” women
in his memoir is a bit of a horn dog.
Let’s just say he is. But he is also
the best of his generation at writing
women. Both Salma and Jack are
witty, opinionated and complex.
When the Author tells Jack that he’s
writing about an ageing man who
becomes obsessed with a younger TV
star, she says: “I’m glad to hear you
are capable of sending yourself up.”
After, he makes “the usual literary
protest, he isn’t me, he’s fi ctional”
and she replies: “It’s better if I think
you’re lampooning yourself. It makes
me like you a little bit more.”
I suspect Quichotte will make
readers like Rushdie more. When he
tones down the boisterousness, he
is capable of beautiful, lucid prose.
If only there were a way to disable
Google on his computer.To order Quichotte for £14.99 go
to guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 6846