In Quichotte, Salman Rushdie takes Don Quixote and drags it through the television-lit wreckage of modern America.

The novel follows Sam DuChamp, a mediocre spy-thriller writer, who invents Quichotte. He is an ageing travelling salesman obsessed with screen culture, reality TV, celebrity, romance, and the synthetic dream-machine of contemporary life. Quichotte falls in love with a famous television host and sets off across America with his imagined son, Sancho, trying to reach her. Very normal behaviour. Literature, regrettably, continues.

But the novel is not just a comic riff on Cervantes. It’s also a nested, self-conscious story about authorship, migration, family fracture, opioid-era America, pop culture, conspiracy, loneliness, and the way fiction becomes a survival mechanism when the real world has become too grotesque to meet directly. Rushdie uses the road novel as a kind of cracked mirror: one story inside another, one delusion inside another, the country itself behaving like a hallucination with a passport.

This is later-period Rushdie, so it has the maximalism, the verbal crowding, the cultural pile-up, the manic referential energy. Not his cleanest or most beloved novel, but definitely one for Rushdie completists. 

UK paperback proof copy, marked “Free proof copy — not for resale,” published ahead of the 2019 Jonathan Cape edition. Very good overall, with light handling and shelf wear to the boards; clean internally.