Lavinia reviewed Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
Review of 'Quichotte' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Centuries after the first publication of Quichotte and after all kind of adaptations, as an opera, a musical comedy, etc.… etc…, Salman Rushdie comes with a new one. But Rushdie’s Quichotte is not exactly an adaptation, he rather uses Miguel de Cervantes’ story, as an inspiration to approach themes such as death, love, or the absence of it, the question of how families separate and how brothers and sisters become estranged. It’s a story of vulnerability and dependence, of fear and alienation, of healing and reinvention.
It also deals with subjects such as racism and the opioid epidemic in the United States. Salman’s Quichotte is an old man who works for a drug company owned by his cousin. He is a traveller, driving around the country selling drugs and staying in motels watching television. In contrast with Cervantes’ Quichotte who was influenced by the romantic novels he was reading, this …
Centuries after the first publication of Quichotte and after all kind of adaptations, as an opera, a musical comedy, etc.… etc…, Salman Rushdie comes with a new one. But Rushdie’s Quichotte is not exactly an adaptation, he rather uses Miguel de Cervantes’ story, as an inspiration to approach themes such as death, love, or the absence of it, the question of how families separate and how brothers and sisters become estranged. It’s a story of vulnerability and dependence, of fear and alienation, of healing and reinvention.
It also deals with subjects such as racism and the opioid epidemic in the United States. Salman’s Quichotte is an old man who works for a drug company owned by his cousin. He is a traveller, driving around the country selling drugs and staying in motels watching television. In contrast with Cervantes’ Quichotte who was influenced by the romantic novels he was reading, this contemporary American-Indian Quichotte is influenced by the TV. The more he watches, the more tempted he become to believe in the world it represents and inevitably he tends to live simultaneously in the world of imagination and the real world. His Dulcinea is a famous, Oprah style, television personality, a fascinating and damaged woman, who is addicted to powerful painkillers like fentanyl.
Quichotte is a book of transformation. Like in Ionesco's absurdist play Rhinoceros, the men of a whole town in New Jersey are being transformed into Mastodons, monsters that in a way are immediately recognisable to us. It’s about what is happening in certain moments in history to people who you know for a long time, and suddenly become so alien that you don’t recognise them, you can’t talk to them, they frightened you.
Quichotte is a book for our age, it is a story of a good and courteous man living among bigots, in a country that affected by troubling impulses and sloganeering rhetoric, slowly but steadily slides its way back to be a racist and bigoted place.
