Quichotte, the Booker Prize long-listed 14th novel from Salman Rushdie, is pitched as a 'Don Quixote for the modern age,' but the book–a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder–is a far more ambitious exercise than mere homage. Applause, certainly, but also: Encore! Encore! Read Full Review > But I don’t think anyone who reads Quichotte will want to release Rushdie from his bonds just yet. I almost found myself wishing that it were Rushdie’s last book - because if so, it would be one of literature’s coolest sign offs, as Puckish as Prospero’s final soliloquy. This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot. Rushdie has taken bits of our shared lives, scraps of our language, and constructed a vehicle as wondrous as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But we are still watching a master at work. We are a long way from the fertile lyricism of Midnight’s Children, and there is nothing here approaching the death of Changez Chamchawala in The Satanic Verses. 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. In Quichotte, Rushdie brilliantly demonstrates the way that a writer’s life seeps into their work, sometimes deliberately, sometimes less so. A glorious 21st-century riff on Cervantes’s 17th century classic Don Quixote. Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism.
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