![]() ![]() Quichotte’s road trip is instigated by an assignment to deliver under-the-table doses of fentanyl to Salma, who’s breaking under the strain of the spotlight. ![]() More: David Koepp's debut thriller 'Cold Storage' unleashes killer fungus (and fun) on humanity And, of course, Rushdie is conjuring the spirit of Cervantes’ picaresque 17th century classic, “Don Quixote,” with its questing, half-mad hero. ![]() We soon learn that Quichotte’s story is conjured up too, written by a spy novelist with an estranged son. Hoping for a son, he conjures one, Sancho, effectively out of thin air. The title character, Quichotte, the cousin of a corrupt Indian pharma executive, is crossing the country to win the heart of Salma, an actress turned talk-show queen. ![]() Rushdie’s path through this brokenness involves strata of shaggy-dog storytelling. Still, Rushdie insists his novel requires this chaos: “So many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind,” he writes, “because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations… Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world.” Fentanyl, gun culture, mastodons and a portal to an alternative universe all figure in the plot, though like puzzle pieces from a missing box, they’re difficult to connect. Early in his 14th novel, “Quichotte,” (Random House, 416 pp., ★★½ out of four stars), Salman Rushdie concedes that his story is a bit of a mess. ![]()
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