Despite her dazzling beauty and great wealth and legions of adoring fans, she is desperately unhappy. She is also a third-generation sufferer of bipolar disorder, prescribed a cocktail of drugs by her doctors and self-medicated with painkillers. A third-generation movie star in India, she came to the United States to star in a hit TV series about spies, then left acting to host a daytime talk show, ascending to Ellen-and-Oprah-level success. If I listen inside myself I hear his book learning and all his favorite TV shows also - I know them all as if I watched them myself.”Īs for Salma, Rushdie tells her story as well. “But how do I know so much, being the teenage son of a seventy-year-old, and born just the other day? I guess the answer is, I know what he knows. “We may be after a celestial goal, but we still have to travel along the interstate,” he says. Smile/Quichotte sets out cross-country in his high-mileage Chevy Cruze on an utterly improbable quest to win the heart of one of the biggest stars in show business, a beauty several decades his junior called Miss Salma R. An aging immigrant from India who works as a traveling salesman for a pharmaceutical company owned by his cousin, he’s losing his mind but not his longing for romance. Whose quest is it? The book’s title is a nom de plume adopted by one of its central characters, Ismail Smile. Pretty much everyone will be familiar with the quest narrative, for which humans seem to be hardwired. Americans might be more familiar with Man of La Mancha. As he explains in a note at the front of the book, its title (pronounced key-SHOT) is the French version of Quixote’s name, a title shared with Jules Massenet’s opera about the befuddled knight-errant.
Rushdie is far from the first to be inspired by it. Quichotte borrows its core idea, though, from Don Quixote, which is one of those classics more cited as influence than actually read these days. Related: Read a review of Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House. But he has lived in the United States for almost 20 years now, so, like his last novel, The Golden House, this one draws much from American politics and even more from American pop culture, especially television.
Rushdie’s native India is a setting for some of the book.
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