50 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 14 2019
by CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAWM
iguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century
masterpiece Don Quixote was
the first modern novel, an epic
realist comedy bursting with
pathos and hilarity, cruelty and romance.
The wandering knight and his long-suf-
fering sidekick, Sancho Panza, endure as
figures of charm and solidity even as they
are amusingly knocked about, tortured,
thwarted, fooled and spellbound. In his
quest for love, with his chivalric fantasies
and poignant ridiculousness, Quixote
maintains his tragic dignity precisely
because he’s ludicrous.
Cervantes devised his marvellous
structural innovation in Part Two of the
two-volume novel, as Quixote and Panza
encounter characters who already know
them, because they’ve read about them in
Part One. The novel is a satire of Cer-
vantes’ Spain and of medieval romance.
In Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, Quixote
is an itinerant old man, Ismail Smile, who
takes to the road after being fired from
his sales job with a dodgy drug company.
In his youth, Smile has wandered the
world as far as Australia, where (in one of
my favourite lines) “he swam amid the
sentimentality of dolphins”. Now, he lives
in Trumpian America, a society in decline,
its structure weakened by demagoguery,
nationalism and racism, its population
addled by drugs and trash culture.Having had a stroke, Smile has taken to
dreaming his way through hours of tele-
vision. He begins his knightly quest after
falling in love with a beautiful Indian-
American TV star, Salma R, to whom he
writes romantic letters, signed Quichotte.
He dreams up a son, Sancho, who comes
into being first as a figment and then asa “real” character, and they set off in a
Chevy Cruze to win the hand of the lady.
Just as Jorge Luis Borges, in his tale of
storytelling, invented his own “Author
of Quixote”, Rushdie gives us his own
fictional writer. Quichotte is being written
by Sam DuChamp, an Indian-American
writer of modestly successful spy fic-
tion, also known as Brother. The story of
Brother, his London-based sister, Sister,
and his son, Son, will echo or mirror or
be refracted off the story of Quichotte,
Sancho, Salma R and Quichotte’s sister.
So, we enter a narrative labyrinth
bursting with inventiveness, comedy and
exuberance. Also, it has to be said, drown-
ing in clutter. It’s a book to be criticisednot so much for cruelty (although there
are beatings) as for exhausting over-
abundance. Do we need to be told the
population count of every town Quichotte
drives through, simply because it can be
found online? But perhaps the irritating
superfluity of the age is Rushdie’s point.
We’re not only tortured by the content of
the information (the news is all bad), but
also by its ubiquity.
It’s tremendous fun, even if there’s
a slight disconnect between sombre
family events – estrangement, illness,
reconciliation, death – and the shallow
characterisation required by the novel’s
furious speed and teeming detail.
Unlike some of his literary contem-
poraries, Rushdie is too witty (and
non-addled) to go in for humourless
grand statements. Instead, he throws him-
self into the mad spirit of the times: this
is inventiveness fuelled by surfeit, easy
access and the paranoia generated by the
insane connectedness of the information
superhighway. Conspiracy theories are
our personal fictions,
waiting to be found.
The universe, c’est
moi; Quichotte leads
eventually to QAnon,
if only you keep goog-
ling long enough. l
QUICHOTTE, by Salman
Rushdie (Jonathan
Cape, $37)Windmills
of his mind
Salman Rushdie’s tilt
at Don Quixote is an
elaborate tale of a
man stalking a TV star
in Trump’s America.
We enter a narrative
labyrinth bursting with
inventiveness, comedyand exuberance. Also, it
has to be said, drowning
in clutter.G
ET
TY
IM
AG
ES
BOOKS&CULTURE
Salman Rushdie: a novel with
furious speed and teeming detail.