This was a did-not-finish book for me.  I keep thinking I should like Rushdie's work, but to=date I haven't been able to get into anything he's written.  This one was no exception.  Rating it three stars only because NetGalley won't let me submit a review without it (and I don't think it's fair to rate a book if I haven't finished it).

I wanted to like this so much. I wanted to so much. But within the first few pages, I just didn't care about the protagonist.

I have always wanted to read Cervantes but I’ve been intimidated by this book. I’ve always wanted to read Rushdie but didn’t know where to begin. So I just decided to start here and take the journey into getting to know Rushdie’s writing and getting a glimpse into Don Quixote (all while getting social commentary of our current times)  and it was so worth it. This story is so well crafted and has so much respect for the reader.

In this novel, Salman Rushdie takes on many aspects of our modern lives through the lens of the Don Quixote story.  In this version, Quichotte is an Indian pharmaceutical salesman who spends his life traveling the roads of America as he visits doctors and sells them the various medicines his extremely successful cousin, Dr. Smile, has created in his company.  When Smile decides that Quichotte has become too old and strange, he lays him off.  But Quichotte needs a mission and he soon settles on one.  He falls in love with Salma R, an Indian talk show host whose various life stumbles are part of her draw to the women who watch her show and try to emulate her.  He realizes that it will not be easy to win Salma's love and begins a slow courtship via letters.  He spends his time slowly driving from the West back to New York where she lives, using the trip to make himself a better person and try to understand the world around him.  He is accompanied by the son, Sancho, who Quichotte imagined into life.

The outer story of this story is that of novelist, Sam DuChamp, a former spy novelist who has created Quichotte to work out his own issues.  DuChamp needs to reconcile with his sister.  He fell out with her decades ago and now feels the need to reunite with her, only to find that she is losing a battle with cancer.  As he works through this trauma, he also uses the Quichotte story to work through other issues.

Rushdie takes on many issues in this novel.  There is the issue of opioid addiction, and Rushdie has a personal issue with this, having lost his youngest sister to it thirteen years ago.  There is the racism that Quichotte and Sancho encounter on their long journey across America.  There is the corruption of massive corporations.  There is the promise and danger of technology in our daily lives.  There is the danger of television and reality programming that promises truth while delivering a sculptured, manufactured lie.  Readers will find much to think and talk about as they read this novel and unwind its many layers.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

This is not my favorite Rushdie, but I did appreciate the social commentary (as per usual) woven into the story. So many sharp points about pop culture, hero worship, media, drugs, families, status-- I just didn't love Quichotte the character enough to give the book my whole heart. And Sancho was... wait for it... surprisingly two-dimensional. Still, Rushdie always gives us a lot to consider and I am happy to have read this one, too.

While I'm a fan of some of Rushdie's work, this novel failed to grab my attention. It's possible that it's just been too long since I've read Don Quixote and couldn't follow how it was referenced. I didn't make it through the whole book.

I reviewed this digital advanced copy. This novel is unique, and in parts it has great writing, and in parts it was difficult to get through. The ending was particularly well done for me, but the fantastical devices felt overdone--particularly where the mastodons appear was unimpressive.

I received an advance digital copy of this book from the author, publisher and Netgalley.com. Thanks to all for the opportunity to read and review. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Mr. Rushdie is an amazing author. His new book takes the Don Quixote tale and makes it modern and fresh while retaining it's absurdity.

5 out of 5 stars. Highly recommended.

He's such a great writer. The story within a story is one of the reasons Don Quixote is a favorite. While this may not be for all readers, it is great for those who enjoy stories about quests and complications.

Quixotic road trip tale with classic Rushdie postmodern references ranging from current events and popular culture to literature and history. If you like Salman Rushdie--or just like big, bright weird novels, you've probably already started it.

Rushdie's skillful writing swerves between the absurd tale of Quichotte, a man who's obsessed with a beautiful talk show host and who managed to wish a son into existence, and the meta-narrative of the isolated author writing Quichotte's story. The playful satire throughout this novel is fun - and ridiculous - to read.

The book Quichotte, at a basic level, tells the story of Don Quixote in a modernized context. However, the book has many more layers than that. It is also the story of an unnamed Author, who is writing the story of Quichotte and his relationship with his writing and with other members of his family. The book is also indebted to other works like Pinocchio and short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, while providing new perspectives on these tales by placing them in new contexts. This is also a book heavily influenced by magical realism. Overall, though, I thought the book handled all of these things well, and it was easier to track the further I read. It offers interesting perspectives on modern-day American culture, such as the opioid epidemic and the addiction to television and "reality" tv.

I actually ended up DNFing this book. Love Rushdie’s writing but I just couldn’t get past the halfway mark. From what I can say for what I read is that this book isn’t for the easily offended. It’s heavily satirical, and as most everyone knows, there’s a grain of truth to most satire. Rushdie hits on very, very relevant topics that need to be in conversation, but I felt like the story just wasn’t going anywhere. I was hoping for something closer to Midnight’s Children in regard to the magical realism but this book isn’t like that. I just felt like I was going on a delusional old man turned stalker’s journey. The irony of which is lost to me in relation to the societal, cultural, and political issues Rushdie focuses on.

This is probably my favorite Rushdie. It captures the essence of Cervante's novel, but updates it with modern concern and worries. It's TV instead of novels that have "rotted" Quichotte's brain. THe author and Quichotte have a slippery relationship, easily interchanged for each other. Some of the name (Brother, Sister, etc.) made it tricky to connect with the characters and the ending felt a bit rushed, but other wise, this book was funny and full of nuggets of truth. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I have been meaning to read some Rushdie for a very long time, but hadn't yet got around to it when this book came up on NetGalley. I was very intrigued: Rushdie, Booker prize shortlisted...hello, sign me up! Rushdie's Quichotte is a dual novel that tells the story of a mid-list spy writer telling a modern day Don Quixote about an Indian American drug salesman. The story is sprawling, with long passages and a mix of different genres. It required a fair bit of patience, but I am glad that I stuck with it.

Thanks to the author, NetGalley, and Random House for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Dazzling modern day Don Quixote. Thanks so much for this review copy, I really look forward to reading more books by Rushdie.

This novel was unfortunately not for me.  As a Spanish teacher, I thoroughly appreciate a new perspective into the beloved story of Don Quixote, however I just never connected with Quichotte.

This was a brilliant channeling of the mythos of Don Quixote into the current context, a romp and fantasy parable full of satirical barbs by way of social commentary.  As a whole, it feels like an appeal to honor the rare fools who believe in romantic love and noble sacrifice as our true path instead of cynically wallowing in our complicity or helplessness with respect to the pervasive nationalism, racism, and anti-immigrant attitudes that are poisoning our current societies and governments.   There are a few satirical indirect digs at Trumpism, but the target for his satire here is the fundamentals of our disorder and our dear leader makes no comparable appearance as he did in the background as an insane Joker figure in Rushdie’s last book, “The Golden House”.  

Our hero, Ismail Smile, is a middle-aged, immigrant citizen with childhood roots in Mumbai.  HE has long worked as a traveling sales rep for a Big Pharma company run by his cousin, now innocently flogging to the medical establishment in the western U.S. their hottest product, “InSmile”, a sublingual fentanyl spray.  He is suddenly fired because he can’t keep sales up the way the company’s cadre of young sexy saleswomen can (often recruited from strip clubs).  Cast adrift with no current family connections, he travels fairly aimlessly in the west, communing with nature on the one hand and on the other retreating to his addiction to schlock TV (e.g. “The Bachelor”) in the cheap motel rooms he can afford.  

Two events transform his defeat into a man on a worthy quest and lead to his metamorphosis from a fool into a surprising hero for us all.   In the first event, one starry night he accidentally conjures up a young companion, Sancho, whom he invests with the identity of his son.  He comes with all the knowledge, language, and social skills of Ismail, but in every other way he is an unformed tabula rasa.  He hungers like all teenagers do to experience the pleasures of being alive and to make a difference in the world.  But his reality is not grounded, so he feels essentially like a crude black-and-white show instead of alive in vivid technicolor.  Sort of like Pinocchio.  Other Disney touches include some magical help from an Italian version of Jiminy Cricket (yes, you are in for some comical fantasy treats if you take this up).      

The second event is Ismail’s mental transformation into a Quixote (Quichotte, or Q as I will refer to him as) on a quest to attain his fantasy love for a TV talk show host, Miss Salma R, who has the stature and fame of an Oprah.   And who just happens to come from the same neighborhood in Mumbai as he did, though she was born to a Bollywood star mother and had some success of her own as a movie actress there and in Hollywood.   Q conceives of a series of challenges to make himself worthy of her love, which he calls the Seven Valleys of purification, which he and Sancho will pass through on the way to Salma in Manhattan.   At each phase, Q will enjoin Sancho to give up with him the arrays of pleasures, knowledge, or beliefs so that only devotion to the Beloved remains.  Sancho tends to see Q as crazy and spouting gobbledygook, but learns to trust him and his strategies to escape the multiple situations where violent racism against foreigners turns against them (sadly, one of which happens in a café in my childhood home town of Tulsa).  A response from one of the attackers provides an example of the Trump shadow in this tale: 

"Get out of my country and go back to your broke bigoted America-hating desert shitholes.  We’re gonna nuke you all."

Meanwhile, Q’s letters to Salma have begun to break through the deluge of fan mail and social media messages, leading her to see him in a sympathetic light and not as a dangerous stalker.  If I had to capture the attention of some heart-throb of my own (say, Scarlet Johansson), I might wish I could come up with a line from Q such as this: 

"I am a sleepwalker, walking as if through a dream, until I awake into the reality of our love."

Q’s obsession with Salma makes for a temporary cure for his despair, which is eloquently expressed in this reverie on the night sky:     
"Up there was the immensity of the immensity, the endless distance of the distance, the impossible scale, the thunderous silence of all that light, the million million million blazing suns out there where nobody could hear you scream.  And down here the human race, dirty ants crawling across a small rock circling a minor star in the outlying provinces of a lesser galaxy in the inconsequential boondocks of the universe, narcissistic ants mad with egotism, insisting in the face of the fiery night-sky evidence to the contrary that their puny anthills stood at the heart of it all."

Amid real pathos to engage your empathy, there are plenty of surprising turns to lift you away into absurdity and competing story threads that widen your view.   An example with the former is a bizarre encounter with mammoth-people in New Jersey.  No tilting at windmills; the windmills tilt at our dynamic duo.   As for the widening gyre, we spend significant time with Q struggling over how to heal a longstanding breach in his relationship with his sister as a prerequisite to achieving any success with his love of Salma.  On a parallel track, we break through into the story of the fictional author of this tale (called “Author”), who seems in the writing to be working out his own barriers to finding meaning in this degraded world we are now living in, including his own breach with a beloved sister.  

I realize many readers may have little patience with such a postmodern trope, but I loved this meta-plot addition to the stew.  Rushdie’s own experience with his fiction breaking through as a disturbing reality impacting his personal life (i.e the Islamic fatwa incurred from his novel “Satanic Verses”) provides some justification for the strategy.  As a payoff for this apparent diversion, Rushdie brins in some science fiction elements to achieve a splendid merger of these parallel stories of a writer and his creations.  

As we ride along with this modern fable, we have no idea what kind of success Q will have in attaining his Beloved.  An idealistic love based on fantasy is bound to collide with realities and unknown human faults that reside with Salma.   When Q finally intersects her in person, we come up against a severe challenge of the fate of such a love when the Beloved requests of him a form of help that conflicts with the moral codes of a true hero.   We end up with a poignant parable on the pervasive issue today of the ends justifying the means.  In the same vein, Rushdie’s ends in serious reflections on the problems with our society justify his means in reviving and revising Cervantes picaresque approaches.

This book was provided for review by the published through the Netgalley program.

I have to admitt that I could not finish this book. I think Rushdie is very talented, but this book was too much, too cynical, too meta. It didn't feel focus and in the end very pretentious. Maybe it was the wrong time to read it.

I love Don Quixote and Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite authors so I had very high hopes for this book. It totally delivered on the satire element I was hoping for and reads like true Rushdie. Don't pass on this if you are a Rushdie fan.