Page 29 - ARUBA TODAY

A29
PEOPLE & ARTS Wednesday 4 september 2019
Rushdie creates modern Don Quixote for tale of love, family

By ROB MERRILL elections.” Miss Salma R. is and the good looks.” The
Associated Press addicted to painkillers and book is crammed with pop
“Quichotte” (Random Quichotte was a traveling culture references like that.
House), by Salman Rushdie pharmaceutical salesman He may be partly satirizing
Good news! You don’t before embarking on his America’s obsession with
have to read Cervantes’ quest. celebrities, but there’s no
masterwork to enjoy Rushdie even gives doubt that Rushdie has
Salman Rushdie’s modern Quichotte his own Sancho, paid attention to the trend.
reinvention. You’ll probably dreamed to life while Sancho again, this time in
pick up on hundreds of witnessing the Perseids an inner monologue: “A
additional references meteor shower near Devils zillion channels and nothing
and inside jokes if you Tower in Wyoming. As in to hold them together.
have, but Rushdie has Cervantes’ novel, Sancho Garbage out there, and
created something that is the pragmatist to his great stuff out there, too,
feels wholly original even father’s idealist. and they both coexist at
if you’ve never heard of When Quichotte uses the same level of reality,
the hopelessly romantic the lessons of “The both give off the same air
Spanish knight-errant who Bachelorette” to help of authority.
sees danger in windmills. plan his pursuit of Salma How’s a young person
It does help to have an R. — “No great quest, my supposed to tell them
open mind, however. boy, was ever achieved apart? ... Every show on
Rushdie’s so-called except by those with faith.” every network tells you the
“magical realism” (that’s — Sancho retorts: “But same thing: based upon
lit-crit for “making stuff up if faith is all you’ve got, a true story. ... the true This cover image released by Random House shows “Quichotte”
in an otherwise mostly real you’re going to lose out story is there’s no true story by Salman Rushdie.
setting”) is on full display to the guy with the moves anymore.”q Associated Press
here. There are mastodons
in New Jersey, a talking
cricket (“you can call me
Jiminy”) and even Oprah
Winfrey has a legitimate
talk- show competitor.
The crazy plot can’t truly be
summarized in a 500-word
review, but Rushdie tells
two stories simultaneously,
Quichotte’s quest to meet
and live happily-ever-
after with Miss Salma R.,
the aforementioned talk-
show host of Indian origin,
and the man writing his
story, pen name Sam
DuChamp, who has
written only “modestly (un)
successful” spy novels until
he conceives Quichotte.
The two stories bounce off
each other in delightful
ways, often matching
each other character-
for-character, before
finally interweaving in a
blockbuster ending that
feels earned, even if not
quite real.
Throughout it all Rushdie
serves up his hallmark
social criticism. Quichotte
is introduced as a 70-year-
old man of “retreating
mental powers” suffering
from brain damage caused
by watching too much
television. He lives in the
present, or what Rushdie
calls the age of “Anything-
Can-Happen,” a time
when it “was no longer
possible to predict the
weather, or the likelihood
of war, or the outcome of