![]() ![]() Sightings of his beloved on YouTube or WhatsApp send him into raptures. Quichotte, a “brown man born in America longing for a brown woman”, effectively channel-hops his way towards Salma R as he checks into motels and neon-lit dives in Tulsa and Wyoming. Rushdie, typically, extracts a measure of humour from life’s high-speed information mosaic. ![]() (Counterculture gurus such as William Burroughs and J G Ballard long ago portrayed existence as a giant theme park dominated by TV sitcoms and soft-drink commercials. The pollution of reality by junk culture and the media is of course nothing new in literature. What he takes for reality is “really” an unreality based on TV dating games and porno stations. ![]() ![]() Rushdie’s Quichotte is a 21st-century knight errant lost in a false image of the world. Having renamed himself Quichotte after his Spanish archetype, he embarks on an ill-fated picaresque adventure to declare his undying love. Ismail Smile, an Indian-born pharmaceutical salesman who has suffered a stroke in old age, watches too much reality TV and has become besotted with a former Bollywood heartthrob called Salma R (a homonymous near-miss to “Salman”). Based loosely on Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century Spanish “anti-novel”, Don Quixote, it unfolds in a US of the near future in the aftermath of civic breakdown. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĪlman Rushdie’s 14th novel, Quichotte, offers a familiar mish-mish of postmodernist self-reflexive preening and strenuously outlandish literary invention. ![]()
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