As one character suggests, “the surreal, or even the absurd, now offer the most accurate descriptors of real life”. Realism, apparently, is no longer up to the job of describing our nutzoid world. It’s Quichotte as in Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century proto-novel, here reimagined by Salman Rushdie as a 21st-century post-novel. In Kansas, Sancho falls in love and vows to return to his beloved when Quichotte’s quest is over.No, it’s not a type of canape. Quichotte allows “spiritual signs” to lead him to Salma (rather than just taking the highway to New York): “Every quest takes place both in the sphere of the actual…and in the sphere of the symbolic…We may be after a celestial goal, but we still have to travel along the interstate.” Along the way, Quichotte and Sancho encounter racist abuse and opioid addicts. Sancho acquires his own spiritual assistant, a talking cricket named Jiminy. Sancho wants to leave Quichotte, but he finds he is unable to: some spiritual force binds him to Quichotte. We learn that Sancho has a wish of his own: to acquire a physical body and live a normal life. The novel returns to Quichotte and Sancho. As the founder of Smile Pharmaceuticals, he enjoys enormous wealth, but his business was built on a range of ethically dubious practices, by which he has contributed to the epidemic of opioid addiction in America. Recognizing this young man as his divinely granted son, Quichotte names him “Sancho.”įinally, we are introduced to Dr. A young man-visible only in black-and-white like an old television image-appears in the passenger seat. As he drives across Arizona, Quichotte spots a shooting star and makes a wish: that he might have a son. He begins sending Salma letters, signed “Quichotte,” and after a while, he takes his fantasy a step further, deciding that he has a divine mandate to rename himself Quichotte and set off in his Chevrolet to win Salma’s heart. Considering how to approach “the matter of wooing a great lady,” Ismail ponders “the classics,” such as ABC’s 196os show The Dating Game.
After suffering a stroke, he becomes obsessed with daytime television and develops an infatuation for Salma R, a former Bollywood actress-also from Bombay-who now hosts a talk show in New York. Ismail is nearly seventy years old, unmarried, and childless.
Bombay-born Ismail Smile works as a traveling salesman for Smile Pharmaceuticals, a company owned by his cousin, Dr. Quichotte was nominated for the 2019 Booker Prize.
This narrative is embedded in the meta-fictional story of Sam DuChamp, the writer who is inventing Smile’s story. Quichotte (2019), a novel by British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, follows Ismail Smile, a senile pharmaceutical salesman as he sets off on a Don Quixote-inspired quest to win the heart of a television personality.
0 kommentar(er)
