When Rushdie’s previous books have succeeded it is because he has been guided by this awareness and found ways to entice us on board, to poke fun at his own excesses.

It is not necessarily a great adjustment but it must be accounted for, and it must be made, otherwise the reader will be left on shore, watching the author’s proud, meaningless exertions with increasing detachment and coldness. Forster has argued, requires perhaps the greatest adjustment on the part of the reader, a special suspension of disbelief. “This isn’t really happening,” Sancho says. Or the unhappy appearance, toward the end of the book, of a Jiminy Cricket-type character.

I didn’t even mention the mastodon invasion. our Garrulous Narrator), who has some unfinished business back home. This story is revealed to us as a work in progress, however, the creation of a second-rate crime writer, another uneasy Indian in America who writes under the name Sam duChamp (a.k.a. In their quest they encounter an America of Trump voters and vicious racism (allowing for that Defense of Hybridity) and become tangled in a subplot involving the opioid crisis (Topical Concerns - check!). He sets off in pursuit of his beloved, and channels for himself a companion, a son he calls, naturally, Sancho. He begins to believe himself an inhabitant of “that other, brighter world” and resolves to win the heart of a beautiful television host (meet our Femme Fatale), Salma R. The new novel, “Quichotte” is a retelling of Don Quixote (there’s our Scaffold), with debts to “Back to the Future,” the Odyssey, “Lolita,” Pinocchio, the Eugène Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” and - why not - the 12 th century epic, “The Conference of the Birds.” Our hero, a traveling salesman of Indian origin, becomes addled by his obsession with American television (in the original, the Don is addicted to heraldic romances).

You could make yourself a bingo card: Classic Novel or Myth used as Scaffolding, Femme Fatale, Story within the Story (recounted by a Garrulous Narrator), Topical Concerns, Defense of Hybridity. For a writer so frequently praised for ingenuity, Rushdie actually follows a formula of sorts. The later books - “Shalimar the Clown,” “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” “The Golden House” - are all tics, technique and hammy narration that try to toupee over patchy stories, exhausted themes, types passing as characters. “If he had a fault, it was that of ostentation, of seeking to be not only himself but a performance of himself,” Rushdie writes of a character in his novel “The Enchantress of Florence,” which could read like stinging self-critique. That famous style has congealed in recent years the flamboyance that once felt so free now seems strenuous and grating. Salman Rushdie, whose latest novel, “Quichotte,” is an homage to “Don Quixote.” Credit.

Salman rushdie quichotte review