387. Quichotte
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Steve Atlee
Author: Salman Rushdie
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy
416 pages, published September 3, 2019
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Quichotte is a modern day take on Don Quixote. In it, spy thriller writer Sam DuChamp creates the character of Quichotte, a befuddled salesman obsessed with television, who falls impossibly in love with a reality TV star. Along with his imaginary son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a quest across America to prove worthy of her hand. Interspersed with Quichotte’s story, DuChamp deals with issues all his own.
Quotes
“BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.”
“Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.”
“AS I PLAN MY QUEST,” Quichotte said, drinking from a can of ginger ale, “I ponder the contemporary period as well as the classical. And by the contemporary I mean, of course, The Bachelorette.”
“Every quest takes places in both the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads.”
“He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.”
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ Czesław Miłosz once said.)”
“Other hurdles were ideological. ‘I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,’ she declaimed. ‘All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote- unquote free choices are legitimising the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.”
My Take
This is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have read and it was a pretty good, not great, experience. Rushdie writes from a deep vein of creativity and has some unique insights into the human condition. I also liked his use of Don Quixote quest as the theme of his book. I myself am on a quest to read 1000 books during my 50’s and can relate to Quichotte’s quest on a certain level.
