Review | Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte brings Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote into the modern age
- An ever playful, layered retelling of the tragi-comedy sees the delusional Don Quixote reborn as an ageing Indian salesman tilting at reality television
Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape
4/5 stars
Is Quichotte – which has been longlisted for 2019’s Man Booker – the novel Salman Rushdie was born to write? An update of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the story is by turns personal and satirical, funny and sad, forbidding and intimate. Writing in 2016, Rushdie noted that Cervantes, like Shakespeare, shared “the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time”.
Of course, one could say much the same thing about Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Rushdie’s exacting 2015 take on the One Thousand and One Nights. Or Midnight’s Children, his modern classic from 1981 whose magic realism opening paid homage to Laurence Sterne’s 18th century proto-magic realism in Tristram Shandy.
