Quichotte

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Length: 16 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder” (Time) from internationally best-selling author Salman Rushdie 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 

“Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming...a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium - a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language.” (Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review) 

Named One of The Best Books of The Year by Time and NPR 

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the listener on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie's work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Praise for Quichotte

“Brilliant...a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.” (Financial Times)

“Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism.... 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.... This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot.” (The Sunday Times) 

“Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes’ story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump’s America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys.... This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.” (The Times, UK) 

©2019 Salman Rushdie (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

“Rushdie’s synthesizing energy, the way he brings together ancient myth and old story, contemporary incident and archetypal emotion, transfigures reason into a waking dream.” (Los Angeles Times)

“An exuberantly imagined and lacerating homage to the revered satire Don Quixote.... This spellbinding, many-limbed saga of lives derailing in the ‘Age of Anything-Can-Happen’ is a wily frolic and a seismic denunciation. Rushdie meshes shrewd, parodic humor with intensifying suspense and pervasive sympathy, seeding this picaresque doomsday adventure with literary and television allusions and philosophical musings. As his vivid, passionate, and imperiled characters are confronted with racism, sexism, displacement, family ruptures, opioid addiction, disease, cyber warfare, and planetary convulsions, they valiantly seek the transcendence of love....Rushdie’s dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials.” (Booklist, starred review) 

“Everywhere he takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, our private lives and the history we make.” (Time) 

Wonderful fantasy

Classic Rushdie. Magical realism but with that underlying sadness and longing that he has in all his books. Vijay Adam’s performance is magnificent. He has an uncanny ability to give each character a distinctive voice.

2 people found this helpful

Tough to follow, closes strong

I think this would be best read and not listened to. Although I will say that the narration is really, really good on this novel.

That said, I had a lot of trouble following the story line and the character building in the early part. The last third of the book is much more engaging and drama-filled and I did not feel cheated at the end,

This was my first Rushdie book and I was left unimpressed overall. I would strongly recommend a physical book and/or Kindle version.

1 person found this helpful

Five Stars Re Not Enough

I’ve put off reviewing this book since I finished it a week ago. That is because I don’t have the reviewing skills to do it justice. So let me just say that was far and away my favorite bo

1 person found this helpful

My first Salman Rushdie. I am hooked!

Quichotte was the first book that I have read by Salman Rushdie. Whimsical, magical, and just fun. Fly with him on his magic carpet of imagination and explore the world through current as well as historical eyes makes it overall fun to read.
The story weaves between truth and life, which can be quite bleak, and the story that the writer is writing within the story, which carries contemporary culture and the problems of the world with sweet-natured escapism.
I loved the book and now must go and purchase some of his others.

1 person found this helpful

A fantastic Don Q for the 21st century.

Rushdie demonstrates that he is a brilliant reader of Cervantes, a maze of broken stories, the blur of reality and fiction, the play between popular culture and high literature. Every word is a gem. But the performance of Vikas Adam is also outstanding, playing characters and accents like a master, I love his Italian Beppe Grillo. Not to be missed!

5 people found this helpful

Still delivers the goods...

Rushdie delivers again with wonderful dialog, vibrant fleshed-out characters, and surprises until the end. I quite enjoyed it!

5 people found this helpful

Not for me

It went on forever. Confusing story line. Poor flow. I had a difficult time going the distance.

A struggle - not my thing.

I wanted to like this story but the narrator was a struggle to listen to and the story itself lost me. Maybe I would have different comments if I read the book.

A Break From Reality

I usually don't read a lot of fiction, and I was good with the start for the journey of the beloved. Then it got kinda weird and lines were blurred. But, in the end, I guess that is the point?

not my favorite

I like Rushdie's writing a lot. but this is not my favorite. it is rooted in modern cultural climate, and I suspect this book will have more impact in a future read. but I found this work less satisfying and engaging.