Quichotte (Rushdie) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The novels [of Rushdie] are imaginative as ever, but they are also increasingly wobbly, bloated and mannered. He is a writer in free fall…. Rushdie’s narrative impulses… lie in tossing in celebrity cameos and literary allusions, in sending new plots into orbit in the hope they might lend glitter and ballast to a work sorely in need of both.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times


Say his name like this: Key-shot. His quest is a long shot, and there’s a gun involved. (Trigger warning: The gun talks.)…. How we see the world—and how the world sees us—are the big themes of Cervantes’s epic. Rushdie’s version holds true to that tale.… Rushdie has always written as though the impossible and the actual have the same right to exist…. [With a] lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming ending.
New York Times Book Review


It is a novel of magical realism that bends the notions of "magical" and "realism" so far…. A fantasy missing all the signifiers of fantasy. A comedy where every single joke fails to land completely. It's got so much music in the words it almost demands to be read aloud. Its so inconstant you'd need one of those serial-killer boards made of index cards and string just to unpack the plot.
NPR


Quichotte, Rushdie’s Trump-era reworking of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, is a frantically inventive take on "the Age of Anything-Can-Happen"… a concoction of narratives within narratives that blends the latest news headlines with apocalyptic flights of fancy.… Rushdie doesn’t offer much hope for our dispiriting times. But in a frayed and feverish way, he captures their flavor exactly.
Boston Globe


Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte is a behemoth of a novel, and with reason. A postmodern dystopian tale, it tackles everything from global warming to the rise of white supremacism to the opioid crisis—which is to say, most of the ills of contemporary society… . There’s much that feels absorbing and true in Rushdie’s latest work.
Christian Science Monitor


Rushdie weaves together all of his subjects, sharply observed, with extraordinary elegance and wit…. At least here’s something worth reading as civilization crumbles around us, before we succumb to our fates. Right?
Entertainment Weekly


A fantastical dream within a dream… a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder…. As [Rushdie] weaves the journeys of the two men nearer and nearer, sweeping up a full accounting of all the tragicomic horrors of modern American life in the process, these energies begin to collapse beautifully inward, like a dying star. His readers realize that they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of the world.
Time


[A] modern Don Quixote…. Rushdie has created something that feels wholly original.… Lucky for us, there are true storytellers and Rushdie is near the top of that list. If you haven’t read him before, this is a good book to start with—it’s fabulist and funny while revealing an awful lot about the world we live in today.
Associated Press


Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted fourteenth novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination.… You can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse.
Guardian (UK)


(Starred review) [R]ambunctious…. Rushdie’s uproarious comedy, which talks to itself while packing a good deal of historical and political freight, is a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [N]othing but extraordinary.…This incisively outlandish but lyrical meditation on intolerance, TV addiction, and the opioid crisis operates on multiple planes, with razor-sharp topicality and humor. Highly recommended. —Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Library Journal


(Starred review) [A] splendid mess that, in the end, becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization…. Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.
Kirkus Reviews