My new review titled “Channeling Cervantes: On Salman Rushdie’s ‘Quichotte,’” is now up on the LARB website. You can read the full article there, and you can also find it on my Writings page. Here’s a short excerpt:
…Rushdie’s novel is much more than a parodic modern recasting of Cervantes’s famous novel. Rushdie has listed some of the genres he has used: “[T]he picaresque, the absurd, the spy novel, the science-fiction novel, the realistic, emotional drama.” He says that he wants to “capture a panorama of our own surreal, metamorphic time.” The novel’s time is virtually the present, post-2016, and who better than Rushdie with his well-known exuberance and inventiveness to attempt to give fictional life to this crazy, scary era in which we all find ourselves. As one character puts it, “It is the Age of Anything-Can-Happen.” And just about anything you can imagine does, including the imagined end of the world.
Until next time,
Brian Finney — Writer