Broken times they may be, but as India, America and Britain lurch to the right, their fates appear conjoined in a globalised world.ĭon Quixote is often credited as the first realist novel in western literature. Rushdie argues that such broken migrant families are the “best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth”. The Author is tormented by his estrangement from his son and his lawyer sister, “Jack”, who is dying of cancer in London. Sometimes, it reads like the work of a man trying to have the final word on everything before the world endsīut their quest is soon revealed as a story within a story, written by an Indian-born spy novelist as a late-in-life attempt at experimental fiction. On their travels, Quichotte and Sancho duly encounter racists, opioids, humans who turn into mastodons, crickets who speak Italian and guns that talk. But even the most unlikely romance seems possible in the “Age-of-Anything-Can-Happen”. Just as Cervantes’s hidalgo lost his mind after reading too many romances, so Quichotte has had his brain addled by trash TV. He has never met her but he sends love letters under the pen name “Quichotte”, believing “love will find a way” of bringing them together. Ismail hopes to win the heart of a young TV star named Salma, a fellow Indian-American, whose chatshow has made her “Oprah 2.0”.
Our knight errant is a dapper old duffer named Ismail Smile who loses his job as a pharmaceutical salesman and sets off across America with a teenage son he has dreamed up named Sancho.
We’re not in La Mancha any more but Trumpland. As one character suggests, “the surreal, or even the absurd, now offer the most accurate descriptors of real life”. Realism, apparently, is no longer up to the job of describing our nutzoid world.
It’s Quichotte as in Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century proto-novel, here reimagined by Salman Rushdie as a 21st-century post-novel.
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