A review by peter_fischer
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

4.0

Quichotte, an elderly American man of Indian (subcontinent, not Native American) extraction, who has failed at pretty much everything in life, is a modern-day Don Quixote, complete with an imaginary son (Sancho), travelling through the seven valleys of spiritual purification towards his True Love, a celebrity actress and TV personality he’s fixated on. But Quichotte himself is only the figment of the imagination of another protagonist in the story, the author ‘Brother’. It gets even wilder, one of the characters is an Italian cricket that grants wishes (Grillo Parlante). Just as Cervantes railed at the idiocies of his own time, Rushdie uses the present-day USA as an exemplar of Western society’s decline: ignorant, stupid, opinionated, uneducated, bigoted, chattering, drug-addled post-modern random idiocratic society! Rushdie is still a top-class fabulist but one suspects he’s also an angry old man (no offence!).