“Quichotte” by Salman Rushdie

This is another book that has been on my list for a while but I cannot remember how it got on there. I almost enjoy that more though, as a result I start off not super excited to read it and partway through realize “oh, this is why I was interested!” and get very invested in the story.

Quichotte is essentially an Indian-American Don Quixote, he has watched too much TV and wants to win the hand of Miss Salma, a celebrity TV actress and host. He invents himself a son named Sancho, who then talks to an Italian cricket and comes to life. They travel across America to win Miss Salma’s heart while Sancho realizes that the world isn’t a welcoming place for immigrants/non-White folks. They also start to have hallucinations, for example a town in New Jersey where people are turning into mastodons turns out to be a vision.

Meanwhile, chapters on Quichotte are interspersed with Sancho’s narration and the Author’s. The Author is similarly estranged from his sibling and son, and as time progresses the worlds of the characters and the author intertwine. First, Sancho senses the Author digging around in Quichotte’s brain, and then events of the book start to play out in the author’s world.

A theme of the book, beyond needing the absurd to make sense of anything, is that the world is going to end. And it starts to, Quichotte then convinces Miss Salma to head to a lab with him to go through a portal together. They burst into the Author’s world only to choke on the air that is too big for them to breathe.

I started off intrigued but a little meh on the book. For context, it was published in 2019 during the first Trump presidency. There are allusions to an orange, deranged president, nothing concrete, but it clearly is inspired by that time and those policies. It does make sense that to try and make sense of a tv president you need a tv addicted man. And that you would go a little crazy.

Once the author emerged as a character I was much more intrigued. There are passages that address what he hopes to do with this work, and notes that he makes for himself about the characters. The interplay of the characters coming into this world as his world intercedes on theirs I think culminates in a really accurate portrayal of what it’s like to live in the Trump era. You feel as though you’re the only sane one, and media consumption is driving you nuts. The only way to cope is to pretend as though it is all normal, like the folks being turned into mastodons. There’s something fundamental that this work captures really well, and I think I might have to reread it to fully put my finger on it, but it spoke to me so strongly.

Now of course I would like this book, at its heart it is a postmodern masterpiece where there are so many movie, tv, song, and pop culture references that it might overwhelm you. But I think that the culmination of it all creates something that is inherently very relatable. I am not an immigrant, but I think it also captures what it’s like to be an immigrant without getting too far into policy or the violence (even though there is some). But just the insane unreality of what we are living in is expertly captured and pinned under a microscope.