Quichotte
Salman Rushdie
★★★★★ 3.5/5
My first Salman Rushdie book. The consistent element of fantasy in his books, (inferred from their descriptions) had created an impregnable barrier between his books and me. To be sure, Quichotte is fabulistic fiction as well, but I find myself more open to fantasy at this time in my life. Mr. Rushdie (or should I say Sir Salman?), is clearly an erudite and brilliant writer but Quichotte is not written for easy, flowing reading, as I suspect his other books are too. It requires you to pour time and attention in return for a somewhat rewarding read.
Quichotte is a modern take on Don Quixote. In keeping with the original, Mr. Rushdie employs a story-within-a-story (metafictional) device: Ismail Smile, a traveling salesman of Indian (dot, not feather) origin , is the creation of a New Yorker of Indian descent, with the nom-de-plume Sam Du Champ, a second rate writer of spy fiction who has resolved to write something new and impactful. Incessant TV watching, not romance books, and an ‘Internal Event’ in his life, add up to Smile losing his touch with reality, and adopting the name Quichotte (pronounced key-shot after the measure of a drug hit), and declaring his undying love for a reality TV star named Salma, bigger than Oprah, with whom he shares common brown ethnicity and the childhood home city of Mumbai. Smile chooses the alias Quichotte because:
He did not want to be prejudged, did not want to be ghettoed inside an ethnic-music pigeonhole surrounded by the bars of white attitude.
Seeking Salma, Quichotte travels by road across Donald Trump’s United States, together with his invented son Sancho—facing racism, while bonding with his creation. I imagine Mr. Rushdie draws on his childhood in Bombay, for the bit about Qichotte teaching Sancho bumbaiyya hindi phrases. The insula this Sancho is promised is the island in the brain that will make him truly conscious and real.
But the book is also the story of the writer Sam Du Champ and how he consciously and subconsciously draws on his own life events in creating the Quichotte fiction and how the two interwoven threads eventually merge. The stories also serve to satirize current day America and to a lesser extent, the UK and India. It is the age of “Anything Can Happen”: an age where our invented culture together with media and social media, pervert the line between fact and lie; an age of opioid addiction, an age where the world seems to have lost its mind more so than señor Quichotte!
The book has a lot going on, perhaps too much: Inception like story within story; opioid addiction; pharma crime; father-son bonding and road trip; brother-sister fallout and reconciliation; social commentary on today’s America (and India, UK); sci-fi apocalyptic end of world scenario; and literary allusions galore—many of which were lost on me till I Googled them. While it’s not terribly hard to keep up with, I’m left wondering at the substance of it all at the end—not unlike Sancho’s quest for corporeality. The many individual themes do not amount to much, but yet, I’m not disappointed with the book. And that I guess is it’s charm.
We read and relate to books—our reactions governed by our own experiences and circumstances. The character called Sister dying of cancer together with her husband after a failed battle with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia was both touching and tough to read in my current situation. Also, the descriptions of the pain one has to endure when cancer becomes terminal are alarming.
The body fights for life until the very end. We are all death's virgins, and we don't easily yield up our flower.
Not at the top of my reads for 2019 but not a regrettable one either.