It’s a concoction of narratives within narratives that blends the latest news headlines with apocalyptic flights of fancy. I knew that the thing that would make the book work was if by the end they could merge, and I really wasn’t sure how to do that for a long time. Quichotte, Rushdie’s Trump-era reworking of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, is a frantically inventive take on ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’ we’ve endured these last few years. There are these two narrative lines, which echo and mirror and talk to each other. This was a scary book for me to write, because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull it off. Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte is a behemoth of a novel, and with reason. It is, by turns, fantastical and all too realistic. “It comes from the literary tradition of the picaresque novel, combined with a certain kind of modernist playfulness,” Rushdie says. Inspired by Don Quixote, Rushdie’s Quichotte sends its hero through an America ravaged by opioids, white supremacy, and mastodons. As Quichotte (the name he takes in letters to his beloved) travels across the country to meet Miss Salma R, a parallel plot concerns the writer who created him these twin story lines eventually converge in a fantastical ending that tips its hat to some of the science fiction tales Rushdie loved as a boy. Inspired by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel portrays an elderly traveling salesman “deranged by reality television” who falls in love with the host of a daytime talk show whom he has never met. Rushdie takes another journey into unexplored territory in Quichotte, which will be published by Random House in September and was recently long-listed for the Booker.
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