RUSHDIE’S AMERICANA
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Quichotte sees Salman Rushdie hit a few of his old notes
Salman Rushdie will be forever revered among Indian readers in English for giving voice to Bombay, or at least his vertiginous, slangy (in several languages), cosmopolitan version of what was once India’s only true modern metropolis. Among Indian writers in English, he will be revered for creating a market where none existed, for opening up the coffers of British and American publishers. It arguably doesn’t matter then that, while his pen remains fecund, he has not written a novel in recent years to match those of his artistic peak: that remarkable period from 1981 to 1995, in which he produced Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh.
In between, he travelled to Nicaragua at the behest of the Sandinistas, a trip which resulted in The Jaguar Smile;
and wrote, seemingly with the edge of a sharp knife rather than a pen, the essays and journalism collected in Imaginary Homelands; there was also his short fiction collection, East, West; his beloved children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories; and an anthology of Indian writing that he edited along with Elizabeth West (the third of his four wives). In the latter, he made the unlikely claim that Indian writing in English was more significant and of a higher order than ‘vernacular’ literature.
Of course, it must have seemed in those heady days of The New Yorker
group photos and Indian newspapers celebrating Arundhati Roy, as if the centre had moved from London and New York to Delhi and Mumbai. But how foolish and arrogant that argument appears now when Indian writing in English is dominated by the cretinous and the inconsequential. At least Rushdie’s still around, banging out the riffs with enthusiasm, though, as with ageing rockers on a seemingly perpetual ‘farewell’ tour, it’s all a little dated, the old razzle-dazzle that little bit forced, the technicolour dreamcoat
that little bit shopworn. Nostalgia, though, is a powerful emotion. What else could explain the presence of Quichotte on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist? The Booker is almost synonymous with Rushdie, a five-time shortlisted author. Midnight’s Children won in 1981 and has since become both the ‘Booker of Bookers’ (1993) and the ‘Best of the Bookers’ (2008), special prizes awarded to the finest winning novel, as chosen by panels of judges and the reading public in, respectively, the prize’s first 25 and then 40 years. For the Booker’s 50th anniversary in 2016, Midnight’s Children was strangely not included on a shortlist of best winners from each decade, resulting in the ‘Golden Man Booker’ award going to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. This is Rushdie’s first appearance on the Booker shortlist, since The Moor’s Last Sigh 24 years ago. In a curious echo, Aurora Zogoiby, the narrator’s devilish artist-mother from The Moor’s Last Sigh, is mentioned in Quichotte, as Rushdie sets the scene for minor spy thriller author Sam DuChamp’s glittering Bombay childhood: “Ma and Pa’s home... was full of the artistic and famous. Creative people of all sorts... Even the great painter Aurora Zogoiby herself came over, along with that notalent buffoon hanger-on of hers, Vasco Miranda, but that’s another story.”
DuChamp (Sam the Sham) makes a belated bid for literary status with a ‘retelling’ of Don Quixote, finding in Cervantes’ lugubrious comic hero, that hapless devotee of the romance, a soul brother. Quichotte—pronounced ‘key-SHOT’ in the “elegant French... for reasons which the text itself will make clear”, Rushdie writes in a prefatory ‘Quixotic Note on Pronunciation’—is DuChamp’s antihero, a septuagenarian pharmaceutical salesman who is a trash TV addict convinced he is about to embark on a love affair with Salma R., an Indian-born movie star who has become an Oprah-like host of a daytime talk show in America. Quichotte, whose cheerfully euphonious given name is Ismail Smile, loses his job and embarks on a journey across America, accompanied by a figure he names, obviously, Sancho, a black-and-white manifestation, Quichotte believes, of the son he is destined to have with Salma R., a young man very much like Quichotte himself. Quichotte, in turn, is very like his creator, DuChamp, who finds himself trying to write one story (Quichotte’s) while simultaneously telling another (his own) and finding perhaps that these two stories are one.
It makes no sense to attempt to offer a precis here of Quichotte,a novel stuffed to overflowing with plot devices, family drama, issues of great pith and moment, jokes, pop cultural allusions, high cultural allusions and lists—so many lists! Rushdie remains self-aware enough, funny enough to make parts of Quichotte worth wading through all the clogged prose, the self-satisfied satire, the trite ‘insights’. And the passages about family, how we lose those we love, are affecting. If only Rushdie didn’t feel he had to dust off that magician’s cape one more time and reprise his too-familiar act. ■