“I want to write about the end of a world,” Rushdie explains.īorn in Bombay, Rushdie moved to England when he was 13 and then to New York in 2000, becoming an American citizen four years ago. The narratives of author and character gradually converge, just in time for the end of the world. “Not yet.” Quichotte, Rushdie’s 14th novel, is his third in five years, completing a kind of trilogy about ‘the present moment’ (Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty) “There is no town in New Jersey called Berenger where people turn into mastodons,” he clarifies helpfully. He considered a research road trip with his youngest son Milan, 22, but ultimately decided not to let reality obstruct his abundant imagination. Rushdie uses a range of styles - science fiction, spy thriller, absurdist parable - to dramatise the era of “Anything-Can-Happen”. This story-within-a-story is the work of a middling spy novelist, Brother, whose own mission is to repair his mutilated relationship with Sister. Quichotte is an Indian-American former opioid salesman who embarks on a Quixote-like quest, accompanied by his imaginary son Sancho, to win the heart of the glamorous celebrity Salma R. Roads figure strongly in Quichotte, a genre-hopping, cross-country picaresque which rips along with a great deal of wit, verve and empathy.
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, review: a wildly entertaining return to form There’s a point in your life when you know the road you’re going down.” “Look, I like it when people like the stuff and I don’t like it when they don’t, but it doesn’t really change my mind. It is richly furnished with topical references including the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, Lana Del Rey, FaceTime, opioids, Law and Order: SVU (“my personal addiction”) and a tech maverick in the Elon Musk mould. Quichotte, Rushdie’s 14th novel, is his third in five years, completing a kind of trilogy about “the present moment”. “So far the books keep showing up,” he says. He is expansive and self-assured with a spry sense of humour and a natural storyteller’s love of anecdote. “I’m not there yet,” he says, sitting in the boardroom of his publisher’s London offices on a broilingly hot day.
Vonnegut, who was then 58, gave him a dire warning: “The day is going to come when you don’t have a book to write and you’re still going to have to write a book.” Now 72, Rushdie is happy to report that that day hasn’t arrived. Rushdie, at last a viable novelist after a decade in advertising, said that he was. “Are you serious about this writing business?” Vonnegut asked at one point. In 1981, flushed with the success of his second novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie spent a weekend with the American author Kurt Vonnegut.
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