Quichotte: A Novel - Hardcover

Rushdie, Salman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059313298X ISBN 13: 9780593132982

Publisher: Random House, 2019

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER · An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder” (Time) from internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE · “Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming . . . a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium—a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language.”—Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Praise for Quichotte

“Brilliant . . . a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.”—Financial Times

“Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism. . . . The narration is fleet of foot, always one step ahead of the reader—somewhere between a pinball machine and a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders. . . . This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot.”—The Sunday Times

“Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes’s story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump’s America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys. . . . This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.”—The Times (UK)

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of September 2019: Quichotte is Salman Rushdie at his best. An exquisite satire on the world we live in, Rushdie’s latest novel pays Cervantes a great, clever compliment with this deliciously funny Don Quixote for modern times. Quichotte is a story within a story, a fictional novelist unraveling his own journey of love and family through writing the story of a man (whom the novelist names Quichotte) not wholly unlike himself. Quichotte is a simple man who has watched too much television and now believes we are living in a world of “Anything-Can-Happen,” when even an aged pharmaceutical salesman can win the love of a beautiful TV star whom he has never met. And so Quichotte’s quest begins. Quichotte creates a son for himself, Sancho, sprung wholly formed to sit beside him in his reliable Chevy Cruze on this cross-country adventure and with whom he might share his vision of the world. Unfortunately, this familial bond does not turn out the way Quichotte imagined. The fictional novelist finds himself in the same situation, discovering that the truths he’s told himself about his relationships and family have been wrong all along. A road trip across America in an age that would be utterly surreal if we weren’t actually living it, Quichotte is an antidote to fear, a novel bursting with intelligence and wit—and exactly what so many of us need right now. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review

About the Author:

Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 059313298X
• ISBN 13: 9780593132982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416