At the book’s launch at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (an event I review here), Rushdie opined that he was incapable of “serious” writing George Eliot, he said, was a genius-but her work doesn’t make one giggle. Clarke and Rushdie’s own previous novels are among the many literary predecessors woven into the book.

Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Don Quixote, Pinocchio, the works of Arthur C. Rushdie’s work is always deeply allusive (what literary critics call intertextual) and Quichotte is no exception. Meanwhile, as Quichotte seeks to conquer the Seven Valleys of the Quest, he and Sancho encounter a town some of whose inhabitants have been transformed into mastodons, among other strange places. Gallant knights are incompatible with the modern world: as a blue fairy tells Sancho, noble lovers who turn up on a woman’s doorstep and pour her a love potion would now be considered rapists-such actions are “frowned on at the present time.” Neither quest goes as the protagonists hope, of course.

He too falls in love and embarks on a quest to win a woman. Sancho starts off in black and white and soon bursts into full colour-like Pinocchio, he wants to be real he wants an independent life, away from his father. As they travel the world in pursuance of Quichotte’s quest, the question of what it means to be human is posed over and over again. He also brings into existence, through sheer force of will, the son he has always wanted, whom he names Sancho.

Most of the narrative focuses on the eponymous lunatic, whose mind, addled by a stroke and by the consumption of far too much TV, conjures up a dream of gallantly proving himself worthy of Salma’s love. The dual plotline follows both Sam as he writes the story of Quichotte and the character of Quichotte himself. He chronicles the travels of a lunatic who calls himself Quichotte, who is on a quest to earn the love of Salma R., a woman he only knows from a daytime TV show. Quichotte is the name of a book-within-a-book being written by Sam DuChamp, a mediocre ageing spy-fiction novelist. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-nominated novel Quichotte (pronounced in the French way, key-SHOT) is a work of postmodern picaresque with a metafictional narrative device thrown in for good measure.

Rushdie quichotte review